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your choice of Linux Distro for -bigadv?

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KGH

KGH

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Joined
Apr 8, 2002
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San Jose, CA
I have an option to fold under native linux. But not sure which distro would yield the most point?
Last time i check that folding under windows XP 64bit with VMPlayer 3.0 + fah-image 1.1 (had kernel 2.6.33) vs Native OpenSuse 11.2 (had kernel 2.6.31) did not make much difference (about 20second faster on native Linux).
Both were about ~30.x mins/frame on i7 920@4ghz.

I thought with native linux it would be little faster (1-2mins per frame?). Or maybe because I used older kernel.


Would it possible to get 29min/frame @4GHZ at all?
if so how to achieve it?


thank you

/Kevin
 
I would like to know as well. I would like a bootable USB with only what is absolutely needed to fold.
Also I'd like to know how to get my -bigadv as fast as possible. Right now my VM is running the last ubuntu os. Takes about 37 minutes at 3.35ghz. I could take it much higher. my temps are under 45c, and my vcore is 1.01. I just experience instability in windows when I do.

Not convinced gentoo would be any faster than Ubuntu. Mint is identical, fedore is as well. (+/- 5 seconds/frame)
 
Use Ubuntu, Debian or whatever disto you're comfortable with; not any big difference to speak of, in terms of performance.

Methal said:
I would like to know as well. I would like a bootable USB with only what is absolutely needed to fold.
Also I'd like to know how to get my -bigadv as fast as possible. Right now my VM is running the last ubuntu os. Takes about 37 minutes at 3.35ghz. I could take it much higher. my temps are under 45c, and my vcore is 1.01. I just experience instability in windows when I do.
Click to expand...

Check out notfreds= http://reilly.homeip.net/folding/
 
Yep, Gentoo will allow you the ease of installing only the bare minimum... or whatever you want really, but it takes a lot of knowledge to wring more performance out of it. Not really recommended unless you're a hardcore Linux geek (or want to be one).

Definitely check out notfreds, the hard part is already taken care of all you have to do is pretty much just set your username and off you go.
 
Gentoo isn't worth it. If your platform is compatible with Arch Linux, it offers all the important benefits of Gentoo, without obscene compile times. If you think compilation optimizations that are specific to your CPU architecture may help you, then Arch is able to do that. However, Arch (i686) is already optimized well for modern architectures and its not really worth recompiling the entire OS for more architecture specific optimizations. Those who think aggressive cflags make a big difference, or excessive architecture optimizations are noticeable, are often compared to RICER's who put big swooping tail fins on their dodge neons to make them go faster.

I loved gentoo, and still like it, but it's only advantageous if you need acute control of package versions (due to the power of portage). For everyone else, Arch is a very suitable alternative, without much of the cumbersome pains that come along with Gentoo.

Gentoo is also great if you really want to learn Linux - I didn't know much other than Ubuntu, but by the time I got Gentoo working in a week or so, I learned more than I did about linux than I did from running Ubuntu for months.

Both Arch and Gentoo are rolling release distro's which mean you constantly get the latest package versions, and there are no major releases like with Ubuntu - as soon as the latest software is out, Arch and Gentoo make it available the next time you update the system (basically). You don't have to wait for the jumping juggalo edition to get that new software version or new features. You get them every day, incrementally (including kernal updates).

I don't have the numbers for you to compare, but you'd be best served by slapping arch linux on with just the basics you need, then doing some folding benchmarking to observe results.
 
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I've yet to make the leap to Arch, I remember you explained it to me before. I'll def. have to take a look at it soon. I've been using Gentoo for many years now and it's just so easy for me, compiling time has been reduced (not by a huge factor, but by some) with a few distcc machines. I'm certainly not ricing out my make file... it's pretty tame actually, runs quite stable. -Os flag, nothing much more. I like to have bleeding edge, and like you said as soon as a new package is released it's usually into portage quite quickly so I can hurry up and break my system just to fix it later =)

I take it that it would be fairly easy to get Arch onto a bootable flash drive with just the basic packages and their dependencies. Does anyone have a list of libraries that are required? I once tried to use the Gentoo minimal install on a USB flash drive to run FAH, however it was missing something and didn't want to run.
 
Pretty easy, and documented decently, depending on what you want to do...

LiveCD:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Putting_installation_media_on_a_USB_key

Bootable flash drive that gets updates and is a persistent install, on a flash drive:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installing_Arch_Linux_on_a_USB_key

Off-topic: best part of Gentoo is breaking things, which isn't hard to do, and figuring out how to fix it. No better way to learn, and it actually gets you so familiar with the distribution, it's hard to walk away... Or at least was with me. Fixing things isn't usually that bad, because you understand how the whole system works pretty well - after all, you built it mostly, and the parts you didn't build, you configured. :)
 
In the VM setup I ran Ubuntu 9.04, but if I were running native I'd have to use 9.10 because the kernel in 9.04 doesn't support the monitoring chip on my motherboard.
 
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