Would like to try Gentoo next

splat said:

i believe it's under "Processor Features"...one of the first 3 options on the main menu.

Click to expand...

"Processor type and features"
It's line 5 for me, but that may vary according to your architecture.

Having just installed on a Pentium 4, I noticed that my previous post was not entirely accurate about hyperthreading (I edited those comments out). Hyperthreading is now selected in a sub-menu after selecting Symmetric multi-processing.

Sorry if I confused anyone.

the best optimization in gentoo is Os, you will rarely if ever see a speed increase by using O3, but you will see a difference with Os because the binary's are smaller and with big apps especially, this makes a substantial difference.

CFLAGS="-march=athlon64 -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
instead of
CFLAGS="-march=athlon64 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" ?

From the Gentoo Wiki:
-Os turns on all -O2 optimizations but disables flags that cause increased binary size and tunes some optimizations for size rather than speed. -Os is very useful for large applications, like Firefox, as it will reduce load time, memory usage, cache misses, disk usage etc. Code compiled with -Os can be faster than -O2 or -O3 because of this. It's also recomended for older computers with a low amount of RAM, disk space or cache on the CPU. But beware that -Os is not as well tested as -O2 and might trigger compiler bugs.

Sounds good. Why not ?

Misfit138 said:

CFLAGS="-march=athlon64 -Os -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
instead of
CFLAGS="-march=athlon64 -O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" ?

From the Gentoo Wiki:
-Os turns on all -O2 optimizations but disables flags that cause increased binary size and tunes some optimizations for size rather than speed. -Os is very useful for large applications, like Firefox, as it will reduce load time, memory usage, cache misses, disk usage etc. Code compiled with -Os can be faster than -O2 or -O3 because of this. It's also recomended for older computers with a low amount of RAM, disk space or cache on the CPU. But beware that -Os is not as well tested as -O2 and might trigger compiler bugs.

Sounds good. Why not ?

Click to expand...

yes, that is correct, and my previous quote was from personal experience. Gentoo builds a fast system if you do it right, but as was stated before, not necesseraly faster then some of the binary distros (arch being one of them), however, the -Os flag will make a difference and in my experience produces the fastest system. as a general rule, size optimizations tend to be more beneficial for speed then (ironically enough) speed optimizations because they tend to bloat the size of the binary. your CFLAGS are identical to the ones i run and i have had great results on both 32 and 64 bit systems.


gentoo is the one distro that pretty much without fail will work on any system i throw it at. i have had systems that i tried 5 or 6 different distros on and none of them would boot or would not boot properly, i slide in a gentoo minimal install cd, it boots, i emerge my system and magically the cursed system comes to life.

I see.

Though Gentoo is probably not going to be my "distro of choice", it offers a lot in the form of displaying the basic foundations of the OS from a stage 3 install. Simply "building" it from base packages and then the kernel and then X and finally a window manager is an excellent, educational exercise for someone like me who is struggling to learn Linux.
I have currently been using a live cd to install it from a s3 tarball and then chrooting into the /mnt/gentoo environment. Lots of fun, and good practice.

Incidentally, I tried a couple different live cd's for the task...First I tried PCLinuxOS mini me and Kanotix, but when doing emerge -uDN world, I got an error whch stated that the device was full. Not sure why this happened but switching to Ubuntu live cd cured it.
I wonder if it had something to do with swapon or if something distro-specific was to blame. (Or, more likely the user was to blame )