Whoa, didn't mean to start a mini flame war! I think the portage system does wonders with the dependencies, and as I understand it portage is very BSD-like (I don't have any experience with BSD yet) with their package system. OK, one box boots up in 24 seconds (from GRUB menu to XDM login), and the other in 16 seconds (GRUB to CLI login). Now, thats a lot faster than default Red Hat installs, which can take minutes on a similarly capable machine. A good part of the faster bootup is that my Gentoo installation is, at least for now, much leaner than Red Hat and doesn't have to load as many daemons. 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. 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. 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. Ryan Caron ACM Secretary
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
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