Help with some choices!

[VeliuX]

Hello, I have been a long term gentoo user. My old computer got smashed by UPS, so i just built a new one. Mind you I have been off the net for about 3-6 months. I set up gentoo already but somehow b0rked it now im going to reinstall it. I have some questions for you guys. First off here are my computer specs.

AMD Opteron 1216 HE (AM2)
Asus Crosshair MOBO
2 gigs of ddr2 gskill ram
2 Sata harddrives
2 Dvd-+r/rw drives
evga 8800gts 640mb video card
creative XF-I soundcard

Ok, my first question is should I used -march=opteron or -march=athlon64? The reason I ask this is because my opteron I don't think is a true opteron from what I have been reading. From what I read its basically an athlon64 x2 with better silicon and more cache.

I was thinking about trying out XFS instead of ext3 (with options -O dir_index) as a filesystem because I hear there are some nice tweaks you can do to it to make it fast yet stable, would you guys happen to know any good tweaks. I googled this but got articles that seemed to be out of date.

Would you guys happen to know anything about SDParm? Or any safe performance flags I can use on my Sata drives. One of my Sata drives is an 74G WD Raptor the other is an 160 gig Cavier.

The first time I set it up I used ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" and re-bootstraped the system with the USE="nptl nptlonly" (I used a stage 3 tarball). This time for stability reasons I don't plan on using the unstable flag. Instead I will use the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64". My last install had so many weird problems. My filesystem gave me "write time in the future errors" when I was first booting up. My system wouldn't shutdown, it would say "system halted". Gnome had problems, loading my user account but not my root account (i tried remaking my user account with no luck). Everytime I emerged something for example I would emerge gltron but it wouldn't show up until i rebooted or until I re-emerged it a couple of times. Just lots of bugs, which I think is attributed to the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64". My cflags are basic maybe you guys might have some suggestions. Last time I used (-O3 -march=opteron -msse3 -pipe).

Sorry if my spelling or english is bad. Thank you for all the help .
_________________
-Baer

[VeliuX]

Woops typo my old cflags were (-O2 -march=opteron -msse3 -pipe) not -O3. Also I might add I have used gentoo for quite a long time. This would be my second attempt at the 2007 version. I have never had so many bugs in my life when using ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" but again it might be the processor and the flags im using. Thanks for the help!
_________________
-Baer

[librarian]

hi VeliuX

for the -march i would definitely go with -march=opteron, even though it's not a "true opteron", in the sense that opteron has changed slightly. the opteron flag will recognize this, and will use both cores, while still maintaining the optimizations which set the opteron flag apart from the athlon64 flag.

with regard to xfs... been there done that. the performance increase is not worth it. yes, it has several nice tweaks, but it has no forward compatibility. ext4 is out, although it's not yet stable (and by that i mean high chance of data loss still). however, if your drive is ext3, you will be able to change it to ext4 (once ext4 is stable) without formatting. infact ext4 will be implementable simply by adding a mount option to ext3. ext4 looks to be much better than what's out at the moment. so i say stick with ext3 in anticipation of ext4.

i'm afraid i cant help you with SDParm, hdds aren't my field yet.

your cflags look fine to me, although for reasons unexplained, most recommendations for opterons leave out the -msse3. if things aren't compiling or working right, it's something to bare in mind. choosing to use the stable branch is probably wise (although i've never gone stable on my own box), and if there is something for which you really want the latest version, you can always add it to your "/etc/portage/package.keywords" as "category/package ~amd64".

hope this helps
librarian
_________________
AMD64X2 2400+, 1024Mb DDR2, GeForce 7150M 256Mb DDR2, Gentoo Linux 64bit (nomultilib)

[VeliuX]

I just got my new system installed and it is running very nice. I did use the -msse3 flag, just to see if it makes things unstable. So far everything seems to be working the way it should. The most unstable thing im using right now is compiz-fusion, which i cant seem to get working right :/ no borders or titlebars. When I type emerald --replace, it still didn't work... I even put emerald in the command option in window decorator..still no go, i figure its a bug, so im using gtk-window-decorator. I am thinking about prelinking, will give that a try everntually. This system flies . I did choose to use ext3, and did some tweaking to it via -O dir_index and tunefs options has_journal, and journal=writeback (if i remember correctly.) Used ext3 tips on the forum by codergeek. I am having trouble getting opengl to compile right. I edit the package.keywords with ~amd64, but one of the packages does not want to compile cause it is masked...its like its not even looking at package.keywords. I figure its another bug, i will wait till it gets worked out. Now my next project is to try to get all or most of my windoze games to work in wine, so i can leave my windoze 64 bit OS. Overall I am pleased the way the system is running. I am a sys admin at a non for profit organization, and want to switch to an OSS operating system for our sever (at least) and maybe also change our workstations over. Our windows exhange server is a pain! Plus most of the systems on the network are ran by clients who like to download stuff and cause more work for me to remove their mistakes. I don't think I would have this problem with a *nix distro or freebsd, because the risk of those OS's catching a virus or spyware is slim compared to windows. Plus I want to use an older computer I have and turn it into a hardware firewall/router. This would require me to learn more about IPtables which I don't have time for at the moment. Thank you for your help! Hopefully I can use some of this knowledge I have been learning towards my BS in computer science.
_________________
-Baer