speed variation in compilation on ppc64? [solved]

[gohmdoree]

i just finished a stage 3 install on my g5. WOOT! wow, in the chroot from the install cd, things were zipping so fast! i couldn't read anything on screen.

i picked the 64 bit userland. anyhow, i rebooted into the box, and it seems its compiling a tad slowerly than what i saw on screen in the chroot.

the only differences i can think is possibly what i compiled into the kernel and what is compiled into the iso kernel?

any ideas here? i'll be investigating and try to make a visual comparison. i can just copy /proc/config.gz into /usr/src/linux and see if that changes?

i don't have hdparm on my sata drive. /dev/sda.

[stmiller]

Do you have

MAKEOPTS="-j3"

in your /etc/make.conf? (If it's a dual G5)

My Powermac G5 dual 2Ghz took about 4 hours or so to compile Openoffice alone. Pretty crazy.

[gohmdoree]

i have -j4 actually.

the point i think i didn't clearly make before was that everything configuration wise was the same, save the building of the new kernel. (vs. the one from the minimal_install.iso)

visually, as things scroll down on the screen, it seemed a tad slower. while in the chroot setting everything up, it was dizzying trying to just even catch somethign passing on the screen.

four hours on openoffice? man. i been just resorting to the binary in my other installs. you find much of a performance change?

can you share your make.conf? would be interesting to see what you have set. i'll post mine and other details once i get home.

the kernel config is not fully optimized yet, but just wanted to get something working. maybe that is where i am finding my discrepancy.

regardless, i was highly pleased to see how my g5 was with gentoo. i probably won't ever use mac osx again, save for a few applications.

[stmiller]

-j4? That would mean you have 3 cpus. -j5 would be for a ppc quad. Yeah openoffice is a beast to compile. Other things didn't take that long at all.

Here are the relevant lines from my make.conf. I'm still on a 2.6.17 kernel (if you noticed the snd-powermac). Going to 2.6.18 shortly.

[gohmdoree]

well with j3, j4, j5

that is really up to you. i have 2 cpu's, but just letting 4 threads compile in make. thats just something you can play around with a bit.

i wish i waited a year, and got the xeon dual core, duo cpu. 4 cpu cores! imagine how zippy openoffice would compile.

i'll post my config later tonight.

[gohmdoree]

assuming you had a radeon card, did you use the kernel drivers or did you emerge ati-drivers? i'm getting the missing keyword mask. did you create an overlay to get this working?

[JoseJX]

ati-drivers are the x86 binary drivers, you want to add radeon to VIDEO_CARDS in make.conf and re-emerge xorg-server and mesa for the open source ones. As for the compilations being "slow", perhaps you didn't enable the radeon framebuffer? The open firmware frame buffer is much slower, so the text would scroll less quickly.
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Gentoo PPC FAQ: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-ppc-faq.xml

[gohmdoree]

josejx,

as always thanks for the insight and tips.

[gohmdoree]

marking closed. not sure if it was the framebuffer issue, or something different from the livecd environment and my newly installed.

anyhow, just a question nothing serious, or such a drastic difference.