On Thu, Mar 04, 2004 at 02:34:01PM -0500, Ryan Caron wrote:
But major distros like Red Hat, for compatibility sake, compile their code (or at least used to) as i386 for compatibility. Some have moved to i586. But my gentoo box is specifically compiled for the P4 with O3 compile flag. So that does speed things up a bit.
Not entirely true. The most critical components, namely the kernel and glibc, are compiled for i386, i586, i686, and athlon. The most appropriate version is automatically installed.
Also, I run seti@home 24/7 on my personal boxes, so I never have any idle CPU percentages. On Red Hat seti@home would slow me down when I was really working the computer's resources. Haven't seen that happen yet in Gentoo.
Running *exactly* the same kernel? Not just the same version as returned by uname -a, but precisely the same line-for-line code base? Most distros patch the kernel, and the scheduler can make a huge difference in situations like that, regardless of whether you or the developer compiled it.
So, maybe its not the compiles that make it faster. But the capability to customize it, its inherent leanness (do I really want to install this if it takes 4 hours to compile)?, and its package system make it my linux distro of choice.
Interestingly enough, those are exactly the same reasons that I prefer RedHat over gentoo. -- Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu WPI Network Engineer