Gentoo Linux faster app-load than (Mandrake|Fedora)

[Mark Mielke]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 11:55:56AM -0400, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 11:41:37AM -0400, Mark Mielke wrote:
> > The purpose of the test wasn't to compare GCC optimizer settings. It was
> > to compare Gentoo to Mandrake. Unless I am wrong, the reason Mandrake was
> > chosen, is because Mandrake purports to be GCC optimized for the
> > Pentium instruction set as well...
> Which is not true. Optimizing for Pentium is very stupid thing to do if your
> CPU is anything but the aging Pentium.
> Mandrake as well as Red Hat and Fedora are all optimized for Pentium Pro and
> later CPUs.

The only not true part is the Pentium qualification. If you read the
disagreement between Owen and I, you should easily note that my
problem with Owen's statement was that he assumed that the Gentoo
person assumed it was all about compiler flags. Meaning, thanks for
qualifying my comment, but you haven't discredited it, but rather,
you've enforced it. RedHat could not be chosen to compare against
Gentoo, because RedHat doesn't pretend to be optimized for
Pentium-class (which includes i686) machines. Mandrake does.

> Difference between Mdk and RHEL/RHL/FC is that Mdk has most packages
> shipped as .i586.rpm (ie. can run just on i586+, optimized for i686)
> while most RHEL/RHL/FC packages are .i386.rpm (ie. can run on i386+,
> optimized for i686).  In reality there is no real difference between
> -march=i386 and -march=i586 if -mcpu=i686 is used.

Again, thank you for the information, but you too are only talking about
compiler flags.

The Gentoo test isn't about compiler flags.

Compiler flags are perhaps a factor, but likely not the most
significant one... Owen and I agree on this, as I suspect, so do you.
The Gentoo tester never claimed that compiler flags were the most significant
factor.

Performance concerns seem to be almost as religious as the editors wars,
or the operating system wars... *sigh*

mark

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