x86-64 box

[Walter Dnes]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 03:55:38PM -0400, Andrew Hammond wrote

> - - If you want rice, gentoo all the way. Comes with excellent
> documentation on how to bolt a 3 foot wing on your Dad's old P3.

  [...deletia...]

> While it is theoretically possible to achieve better performance by
> compiling your own binaries, the amount of skill require to actually do
> so is substantial. Unless you're a professional systems / tools guru,
> you don't have the skill to build better binaries than the package
> maintainers for the major distros. Portage doesn't solve this problem.
> If anything, it aggravates it by giving people the impression that they
> have capabilities which they are actually lacking. Gentoo kiddies, don't
> seem capable of understanding this.

  That may be true of a few cloobies, but it's an unsubstantiated smear
against the rest of us Gentoo users.  There are some people who are
congenitally incapable of following simple instructions.  In the Windows
world, they run "My_Naked_Wife_Playing_Tennis_With_Bill_Clinton.scr"
each time they get it in the email, regardless of how many times they
get told over and over *NOT* to do it.  They should never admin anything
more complex than an Etch-a-Sketch.

  In the past, difficult linux installs screened out the cloobies who
couldn't follow simple, let alone complex, instructions.  They were the
ones whining that they couldn't get linux installed.  Now with
"user-friendly installs", anybody with half a brain can install linux,
and they often do.  Put linux in the hands of a cloobie, and you've got
trouble waiting to happen.  Gentoo offers the user more control.  For
competent users, it offers more power.  For the cloobies, it amounts to
more rope to hang themselves with.

> Furthermore, for the vast majority of systems, the performance
> difference between perfectly optimized binaries and generic debian
> compiles will be un-noticable.

  You obviously haven't run Debian and Gentoo on the same box.  I've got
a 1999 Dell, 450 mhz PIII, 128 megs of ram, which refuses to die (they
don't make them like that any more).  I used to run Debian stable on it,
until the fall of 2003.  At that point, the latest versions of Firefox
and Realplayer refused to install, due to extremely old gtk (and other)
libs on Debian.  I switched to CRUX unix, which gets updates more often.
It also assumes i686 instead of i386.  I wanted more optimization, and
Gentoo was the answer.

  Commonsense disclaimer... cpu tweaks are *NOT* going to speed up a
program that pounds away on the hard drive.  Xboing is an old game that
is currently sitting at Techrescue.  It's not being improved.  Today's
Xboing tarball is basically the same as 2003's tarball used to build the
Debian package (author's latest comments are dated before I bought my
Dell in 1999).  Under Debian, I could easily play it with "-speed 1" or
2 or even as high as 3 (out of 9).  The first time I tried it under
Gentoo at "-speed 1", I couldn't touch the balls because they zoomed by
too fast.  I had to follow instructions on the Gentoo forum to tweak 1
line in the Xboing source code to massively increase the delay loop.
Now I can play Xboing again.  This is *THE SAME MACHINE* folks.

> However, I'm willing to bet large amounts of cash that a gentoo binary
> compiled by some amature "for performance" will never be more stable
> than the debian binary compiled by the package maintainer. Non-trivial
> binaries require even more skill and experience to build well. The
> idea of using a libc compiled by someone with less experience than the
> most Junior sysadmin is somewhat disturbing. But then I actually
> expect my computer to work. This is another thing that just seems
> beyond the grasp of your average Gentoo kiddy.

  Properly setting up CFLAGS and USE is an RTFM-and-fill-in-the-blanks
excercise.  Unfortunately, some people cannot seem to comprehend simple
instructions... like *DO NOT* use "-O3" (or higher?!?!) and *DO NOT*
increase the MAKEOPTS -j setting beyond recommended limits.  On my Dell,
my "3 foot wing" consists of...
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse"
plus including "mmx" and "sse" in the USE variable.  And my system is
very stable, thank you.  On the other hand, there are some users who
*INSIST* on "-O9" and/or "MAKEOPTS=-j16" (for a *SINGLE-CORE SINGLE-CPU*
machine).  When they come whining about "instability", the flaming they
get on the *GENTOO* forums is far worse than your comments here.  It
comes from upset Gentoo users who don't appreciate being associated with
these idiots in the mind of the linux community.

> Consider the growing trend for opensource developers to refuse to
> accept bug reports from Gentoo users. It's got nothing to do with
> prejudice.  They simply don't want to waste their time dealing with
> spurious bug reports.

  I've got news for you; *GENTOO PACKAGE MAINTAINERS* refuse to take
bug reports from "Gentoo ricers".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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