Since the arrival of the very first versions of Gentoo, some people have announced that “Debian is good, but that’s not optimized for [distribution in which you run make all the time]”. And this is wrong, you are free to recompile software you use on Debian, using the apt system. Downloading a tarball, uncompressing it, running configure scripts and make install, is an easy task for every Linux user, but this is not adapted for the Debian package management system. Stow was a way which worked without too much effort, but compiled programs were not really integrated in the apt dependancies. The ultimate solution is to use apt-build to recompile a software already packaged for Debian. Read in English – Read in Portuguese (Brazilian)
It didn’t work for me on bzip2 package. CFLAGS set in config file was ignored.
But if you want things optimised why not just run Gentoo/[other source distro] in the first place?
Gentoo has a lot more going for it than just optimised packages. Hell, the reason I use Gentoo isn’t because of the optimisation, it’s because of the up-to-date packages, friendly community and the power of Portage in other respects (USE flags, etc).
Debian Sarge is more complete and conservative distro. As for me, I am not of those guys who want the newest packages in their system, but I was a gentoo user before
I ran Gentoo for a year using basic suggested CFLAGS and USE tags to strip out all KDE-related stuff as i was using Gnome. It was great for keeping my apartment toasty during the winter with all the compiling. The user forums were also great.
When I tried Debian, I was floored when it seemed to be more responsive with the supplied binaries. I’ve run Debian unstable now on three machines for a year and haven’t looked back. I also haven’t needed user forums except for a few exceptional times.
The last thing I compiled was Freeciv beta #6 because that’s the only way I could try it. The whole optimization thing really is misleading and I doubt whether it is worthwhile.
Where Gentoo shines in my opinion is in how easy it is to run the bleeding edge packages out there because maintainers are out there packaging it up without having to make binaries.
However, Debian experimental wasn’t too bad in getting the latest Gnome available.
where gentoo shines is more that:
– it’s very, very flexible. (as you said, you can strip all kde stuff easily, but its a very small example)
– its quite up to date, but more important, if you want a package which is just out and no distro has, on Gentoo its usually as hard as cp app-1.1.ebuild app-1.2.ebuild, because it’ll build it very easily and even if the package changes much, its very rare that the ebuild has to be ever modified.
– you can make your custom packages very easily too
– the whole distro feels clean
– hardened gentoo is another good point, will build pie-ssp packages for everything you compile, and you can choose between rsbac, grsec, and selinux as rbac/acl/mac (or none)
– the community is helpful
– you *will* learn linux, not how to point and click, or how to copy/paste/learn a single command line. docs are very very nice and that’s always one of the strongest points of any product.
There’s probably more good *and* bad points (eg: long install time, even if Gentoo supports binary, there are no binary servers)
That gentoo is faster might or might not be important. If you bloat your cflags it’ll run slower than debian. If your hd is slow and you make larger binaries, it’s gonna be slow too, and so on. It won’t give you a significant difference in the end. And we don’t care. That’s not the real power of Gentoo.
“When I tried Debian, I was floored when it seemed to be more responsive with the supplied binaries”
Thats the experience I also have been having. Compiling stuff yourself gains you nothing, better leave it to the guys who know what they are doing.
When I tried Debian, I was floored when it seemed to be more responsive with the supplied binaries.
Similar experience here with Slackware – which seemed faster than my friend’s -O3 gentoo. I have to add that slack was a fresh install. Now slack and gentoo seems equal in responsivity/speed (using KDE on both). On the other hand, since most of the time (90%) I use FreeBSD, putting CFLAGS= -O2 -pipe in my make.conf seemed a natural thing to do, although I still don’t know if it makes that much of a difference.
I’m also another Gentoo user that has switched to Debian. I loved Gentoo, but I love even more Debian :-).
I loved in Gentoo the idea, the management and the uptodate of the packages, but I was tired of waiting an hour to install a program that I need know and getting compilation errors without any reason (meanwhile I have learned that there is a way to avoid there compilation errors).
After switching to Debian the only thing I miss are the uptodate packages, but Sarge is not bad in that and I have get used to it.
While Gentoo is nice and Portage is quite powerful, it seems that all this ,,Gentoo is fast” is a placebo effect. I’ve been using a Gentoo desktop prepared by Gentoo Geek (all tweaked and shiny) and didn’t noticed anything special. It looked like my Ubuntu, Debian or Slackware desktop.
I like Portage wait to fiter unwanted stuff (like QT/GTK libs when you’re using Gnome/KDE) but it’s still two days of installation vs. 40 min with Slackware. 🙂
Gentoo and other source distros have their strong points. Especially many software developers seem to like them (as compiling software is their second nature anyway…?) It might be easier to test and install new beta versions or customized versions of software on source distros etc.
It should be easier to install different versions of a same program on Linux, I think. There are only a few distros that help in that task. I think Rubyx might be one of the best distros in that respect. (Other good ones?) Haben’t tried it but AFAIK, as it installs software into version specific folders, it can make that task very easy. Rubyx has a very unorthodox file system hierarchy, however.
As to Debian, if you want more uptodate packages than what Sarge has, just use Debian Unstable. With apt-listbugs you can avoid any major bugs when updating and installing software. And I bet Debian Unstable is more stable than many of the Gentoo systems out there, probably even faster too… I like Debian, its stability, philosophy and large user and developer-base, but the Debian system may be a bit restrictive if you would want to do something non-standard, like test various versions of the same software package. I think that the strongest points of source distros may be in that sort of specialized situations. They are just more flexible than a big binary-based distro like Debian.
But if you want things optimised why not just run Gentoo/[other source distro] in the first place?
Because in Gentoo ALL your packages have to be compiled (ok, not all, there’re binary packages but those are a exception not the rule).
In Debian the rule is binary precompiled packages, the exception would be the optimizations done by apt-build. I don’t think it has sense to compile *everything*. Personally I’ve been using apt-build for more than a year, I only compile some basic packages – libc, Xfree, GTK – but not everything.
I must admit I still don’t know why I do it, there’re no speed diferences – real optimizations came from better algoritms, data structures, overall design etc. not from microoptimizations. It may have sense to optimize a mp3 encoder, but not things like openoffice…
Optimizations are so hard to notice anyway. Even if you have measured that every operation on the desktop takes 5% less time (and you will never achieve such a huge boost from compiler flags anyway), you will not notice this in real life.
Even the optimizations that were done in konqueror, which was over 200% speed increase for displaying large directories, was barely noticable when you actually used it. Sure it might be evident when you compare the two cases side by side but during general use I can’t even tell that there was a change.
you *will* learn linux, not how to point and click, or how to copy/paste/learn a single command line
You know, there are people who are not using a distro to learn Linux, but because they wand to use Linux on their machine. Gentoo is a fun distro, I really like it, being one of those guys who really like doing most things by hand. But, not so much surprisingly, Debian is the distro which still remained on my main machine for many years now.
Being able to compile and customize everything to the last piece of dust in the farthest corner isn’t everything. But if you wish to do so, you can do it on many distros, not just Gentoo (granted, Gentoo makes it easier than most others). You can also build your Debian from scratch, I hope this is not the news of the year for most of you. But it’s usually not the point. The point is, for everyday effective usage one needs a distro which is easy to handle, updateble like a breeze, no unpredictable and undeterminable behaviour, and noo need to cmpile openoffice.org, x.org and kde overnight when doing a larger update.
Best is, you can choose distros from point&click (l)user ones to all-building Gentoo-like ones. Clever users try some of them (gee, I used Slackware then RedHat for long, before finally stuck with Debian, and Slack was just great), and stick with the distro which stands most close to their way of Linux. There are so many of them, surely everyone can find his/her favourite.
i don’t like the gentoo system, it relies too much on being net connected, not a great way to build a server.
i did love apt-get when i tried it on suse, but for now yum-update on fedora is for me, and it would be really nice to have it optimised for my athlons, instead of p4
i still think, that slackware is the more confortable alternative to gentoo (40 min. install as mentioned before).
still you can do almost anything you can imagine – as nearly no pathing occurs, compiling stuff manually is as easy as on gentoo and the lack of dependency checking makes many things easier (not a joke). furthermore with linuxpackages.net + swaret or slapt-get you have lots of cutting edge binary packages readily available…
I have to agree with the placebo effect statement. I tried gentoo for a while, reading and researching what flags to use. I tried several, but no matter what I did, the system was *slow*. One could say that I used the wrong flags (though according to many people they were the right ones), but how does that make a case for Gentoo? I should spend *more* time figuring out flags and compiling everything yet again so it *might* work better this time?
How is that preferable to debian? I’d much rather let someone else do the compiling most of the time, while still having the opportunity to use deb-src when needed. For example, using deb-src to obtain kopete allows you to avoid the standard binary’s dependency on xmms, and therefore gtk1 (wtf).
Debian is ready to go speed, with flexibility and optimization when you need it.
That’s one of the things I like so much about the *BSD’s. You can choose either way, binary packages (pkg_add) for quick setup, or compiling from source (ports / pkgsrc) for squeezing out that extra bit of performance. Both work great AND you can mix them, as they use the same packaging/dependency infrastructure.
i am just curious what your point is. you don’t like gentoo’s build system which needs net connectivity and you like yum-update on fedora? doesn’t yum-update need net connectivity anyway?
back on the topic: It would be really great if i knew apt-build when i was playing on debian system. i would have fun time
now i stick on freebsd’s ports system. but i wish some day i could try that method (and also gentoo again)
I am going to join the ranks of the people that used Gentoo but have recently switched to Debian. While I did cared of the optimisations in the past, I never really noticed a performance increase with hordes of flags. I *really* love portage but I have better things to do than compiling and messing with broken packages on the *stable* branch.
However, I will stay with Gentoo for my server. For some reason, I find Debian a bit bloated, I am completely unaware of the location of many configuration files and I am lost with ye olde sysv-init system.
I really don’t see the point in recompiling everything on Debian. As has been said, you might as well use Gentoo – Portage > apt anyway.
But to me the really dumb thing is that if you recompile everything with aggressive optimisations on Debian (a distro which is noted for it’s stability) you’re almost certainly going to break something sooner or later. When you do, just try asking for help – I bet you won’t get much, they’ll just laugh and say “That’s what you get for recompiling everything”. At least with Gentoo they’re expecting that you’ve compiled it so aren’t going to make such a fuss.
I will be sticking with Gentoo; it may be a placebo, but mozilla-firefox certainly seems faster than mozilla-firefox-bin. And Portage is just that good.
I don’t see the article advocating *anywhere* that you should rebuild everything. On the other hand, you could rebuild, say, the GIMP, xine / mplayer / dependencies, and all media encoding / decoding libraries. There, you’ve now successfully recompiled everything that’s actually likely to get a benefit from processor-specific compilation, and you don’t have to bother with the rest of the system. Maybe that’s the idea.
Saying ‘why not just run Gentoo?!’ is classic missing-the-point; people are happy with Debian. They like it. But maybe they want to recompile one specific package, or a few specific packages, for one reason or another. Why stop them? Why say it’s dumb to do so? Why suggest that they change their entire distribution? Why not just recognise that this is a useful bit of functionality?
“if you recompile everything with aggressive optimisations on Debian (a distro which is noted for it’s stability) you’re almost certainly going to break something sooner or later. When you do, just try asking for help – I bet you won’t get much, they’ll just laugh and say “That’s what you get for recompiling everything”. At least with Gentoo they’re expecting that you’ve compiled it so aren’t going to make such a fuss.”
No, that’s just not the case. If you use insane CFLAGS on Gentoo, the devs will give you the cold shoulder. See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072 for one great example.
I used Gentoo for three years, and since one month i am torn between Gentoo and Ubuntu. Ubuntu has sane defaults and does lots of things for me which i had to do on my own in Gentoo, but what i really miss is not optimizing your packages, but having the latest versions of everything in portage. In Ubuntu i have a lot of outdated versions with bugs that are already fixed in the newest releases. But switching to Hoary might give me even more breakage.
Also, on Gentoo it was much more comfortable and easy to get all the packages that are illegal in the US and perfectly legal in the rest of the world.
Carefully selecting and researching your Cflags, Ldflags and Useflages can indeed improve performance, and in my experience has. Just by compiling Xchat with -Os instead of -O2 can drastically reduce the size of its executable. So also does choosing which options get compiled into the executable — Useflags. How the executable links to other (shared) libraries during runtime can also be controlled as well as the behaviour of shared libraries (e.g. whether or not you want to keep them in memory, or whether or not you want lazy binding etc).
Oh, and this is not even half of the customizations and optimizations that can be carried out Gentoo. For instances, it is not unusual to find kernels patched for optimal desktop/gaming/multimedia usage in the Gentoo community. Those who value desktop responsiveness know to use kernels like nitro-sources, love-sources or even gentoo’s gentoo-sources among a plethora of others. I didn’t begin to appreciate Gentoo until I realized my Gentoo hard disk was half the size of my Debian hard disk, even though they both have approximately the same number of packages installed. Almost half the size!
There are several catches. You have to be patient. You have to know what you want and what your are doing. You may have to experiment. You have to do your home work, because in Gentoo land, no one will do it for you. With Gentoo you are your own master. And operating system catastrophes, suicides and borkages is not only condoned, it is tacitly encouraged. Meh, how else will you learn? Gentoo is the fastest distro I’ve used baring none. Ubuntu comes in second. Binary distros have always felt slow, Fedora most especially.
So, yes, Gentoo is fast for those who know what they are doing (developers, programmers and operating system enthusiasts), otherwise it will be no different from Mandrake, Ubuntu, Vector and $favorite_linux_distro.
@ Syntaxis:
No, that’s just not the case. If you use insane CFLAGS on Gentoo, the devs will give you the cold shoulder. See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072 for one great example.
I hope so, that guy completely fucked up his CFLAGS! -DTT_CONFIG_OPTION_BYTECODE_INTERPRETER is useful only for freetype2 (it enables patented bytecode interpreter) and is provided by the build, I can’t understand why it’s there.
It should be easier to install different versions of a same program on Linux, I think. There are only a few distros that help in that task. I think Rubyx might be one of the best distros in that respect. (Other good ones?) Haben’t tried it but AFAIK, as it installs software into version specific folders, it can make that task very easy. Rubyx has a very unorthodox file system hierarchy, however.
Gobolinux is another good one.
For more info about the Gobolinux directory hierarchy:
http://gobolinux.org/index.php?lang=en_US&page=doc/articles/clueles…
BTW, I use Debian and Slackware, and I’ve tried Gentoo, and I’ll probably try Gobolinux 12 when it is released.
“Those who value desktop responsiveness know to use kernels like nitro-sources, love-sources or even gentoo’s gentoo-sources among a plethora of others.”
Gentoo-sources is fine, but the others you’ve mentioned are a big no-no unless those users don’t mind having all their bug reports ignored. Quoting from the current forums sig of Ciaran McCreesh (one of the Gentoo devs, for those who don’t know):
—
Don’t use -nitro/-love/-shortwang kernels, or if you do don’t even think about submitting any bugs.
—
There are several catches. You have to be patient. You have to know what you want and what your are doing. You may have to experiment. You have to do your home work, because in Gentoo land, no one will do it for you. With Gentoo you are your own master. And operating system catastrophes, suicides and borkages is not only condoned, it is tacitly encouraged.
It’s quite fun at the beginning but it gets quite boring and tedious after a while (two years for me). You don’t always have the time nor the will to fix some new package that doesn’t want to compile or an update that failed. Not that other distros are perfect (I loved Arch Linux until everything broke) but they do tend to get better QA (in my opinion).
As for the speed, I still have Gentoo on my laptop and it doesn’t feel significantly faster than Fedora Core 2 inside XOrg/KDE. Then again, perception is a personal thing…
I could really care less if Gentoo was optimized for my arch, I like it because all I have to type is emerge <package> and I have the latest and greatest and the package management lets me remove the package if I want without having to worry about if the make file has a ‘make uninstall’
I read a review once by a group of people that installed a number of linux distributions accross a number of similar peices of hardware. Debian either came out on top or at least beat gentoo, which they found surprising.
However, the src debian packages are a great idea and i use them if i feel the need.
yes! this is where Debian outshines the RPM based distros, with sarge ya can just install a base system and compile the rest…
Slackware has been a long time #1 favorite of mine, but i been keeping a close eye on Sarge’s development and i really like what i see, very tempting to switch to Sarge, maybe when it goes stable :^)
QUOTE: “I could really care less if Gentoo was optimized for my arch, I like it because all I have to type is emerge <package> and I have the latest and greatest and the package management lets me remove the package if I want without having to worry about if the make file has a ‘make uninstall'”
Care less about optimization? But care about the “latest and greatest” packages” and simple package removal? hehe then you must read below…
For the latest and greatest packages, on a Debian machine with broadband connection, all one needs to do is to perform an ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ after editing one’s /etc/apt/sources.list by changing all references from ‘stable’ or ‘woody’ or even ‘sarge’ aka ‘testing’ to ‘unstable’ or ‘sid’. For even more bleeding edge packages (e.g. GNOME 2.8 was uploaded to Experimental barely hours after its official release), just add the ‘experimental’ repositories to your sources.list. One will also need to write up a preferences file in your /etc/apt/, placing a higher priority for ‘experimental’ packages if you want really want to live dangerously at ALL times. Oh, and don’t forget to run ‘apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade’ for those currently on ‘woody’/’stable’ or ‘sarge’/’testing’ but wants to switch to the bleeding edge ‘unstable’/’sid’ and ‘experimental’.
As for removing/uninstalling a package from a Debian install, all one needs to do is issue ‘apt-get –purge remove foo’ or ‘dpkg -P foo’. Simple?
Just rebuilt Bochs because the normal package doesn’t enable the internal debugger. It was very handy to have the dpkg-buildpackage command available to build debs (Far neater than ./configure && make && make install), although I could have lived without Bochs being split into 7 different packages (Pinning is useful, but annoying).
***
emerge gnome-network. Go on, I dare ya :>
Gentoo’s testing branch is updated far more frequently than Debian’s.
I used Debian for a number of years, it’s a decent distro, but for some reason or another Gentoo just feels twice as solid. Portage is easy to use, the packages are always up to date, and no package I have installed from EITHER the stable or testing branch has ever broken my install. That’s my main love for Gentoo: its packages are top-notch. On Debian I was always worried about installing a package from testing because doing so a number of times in the past had broken my system.
I feel like I know my Gentoo system. I know what’s installed, I know where my config files are, I know that my “-X” USE flag will prevent my server from using binaries with usless cruft. Most packages take less than 10 minutes to compile on my 1.5GHz and since I don’t plan to reinstall anytime soon the compiling thing isn’t all that much of a hassle. Overall, it’s the best distro for me and I couldn’t ask for better.
There is apt-get for RPM. Is there apt-build?
I used and loved Gentoo. Until the system broke after updating (emerge) a system that was a couple weeks old. I immediately switched to CentOS which turned out to be very stable.
I recently switched to Debian Sarge. On a hosted machine, I upgraded their default Debian Woody to Debian Sarge simply by replacing the word ‘stable’ with ‘sarge’ in /etc/apt/sources.list and then typing ‘apt-update && apt-get dist-upgrade’. It prompted me a few times if I wanted to replace existing configs with new ones. Done.
While I miss having more up-to-date packages, I know it’s the price to pay for having a super-reliable distro that JUST WORKS.
The only problem I have with Debian is that they’re fanatics when it comes to licensing and GPL.
For example, libapache2-fastcgi isn’t available in Sarge because the maintainer doesn’t like the licensing and wants to replace it with a less-reliable but more “free” version. And there are no friggen bugs listed for libapache2-fastcgi.
Why does this matter? Because it means a high-quality product like fastcgi won’t make it into Debian 3.1 when it is released as stable. And that means it won’t get the attention of their security team.
This is really what makes Debian GNU/Linux different! And I love it!
They are the only that carefully examine licenses, and classify software in “free”, “contrib” and “non-free” sections (note that modern FSF manuals are non-free `software’ according to Debian guidelines); and the only that comply strictly with licenses; discussions in Debian-legal maillist are quite rigorous on this matter.
Using Debian, one realizes where the problems are with patents and licensing issues. I learned a lot (and became more FOSS zealot…).
No, that’s just not the case. If you use insane CFLAGS on Gentoo, the devs will give you the cold shoulder. See http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=74072 for one great example.
Yeah okay, but that guy was seriously off base. My point is that using -O2 on Debian would probably be enough for the cold shoulder, whereas that guy came up with an insane list of flags, many of which I’d never heard of before.
Typically in Gentoo, the only ones that make the devs roll their eyes are things like -malign-double and -ffast-math which are pretty clearly said to be dangerous in the docs.
Don’t use -nitro/-love/-shortwang kernels, or if you do don’t even think about submitting any bugs.
Get over it… they work fine. What exactly do you suggest people use, given that things like swsusp2, decent orinoco drivers and fbsplash aren’t included in vanilla kernels?
There seems to be this mistaken belief that if one tracks ‘unstable’ or ‘unstable/experimental’ in Debian, one gets no security updates which is preposterous. The new upstream releases to various packages comes with the security patches along with other bug fixes. One thus is NOT missing out much and one gets the “latest and best” at the same time (i.e. when one uses ‘unstable/experimental’ along with unofficial repos e.g. the marillat, rarewares or Hess’s ones).
Only fools use ‘testing’ at times other than when ‘testing’ is near a ‘stable’ release date. Any one who calls himself/herself a half-decent Debian user knows that ‘testing’ is quite borked a lot of the times in the period between stable releases (i.e. >6 months after a ‘stable rlease till ~6-9 months prior to the next ‘stable’). Honestly, other than Ubuntu and perhaps Specifix, I believe NO other distro comes even close to matching the speed at which some packages get into the mirrors (e.g. GNOME 2.8 and goobox), so much for the “outdatedness of/in Debian”…;)
Oh I forgot to mention, any half-decent Debian user on ‘testing’, ‘unstable’ or ‘unstable/experimental’ will have both apt-listbugs and apt-listchanges installed. The packages do what they are supposed to do and do a good job at keeping one informed of the bugs and changes present in packages one wants installed or upgraded. Unless one is blind, the typical user tracking these branches will put problematic packages on ‘hold’ status. That is unless one is in the mood to squash the bug/s present and perhaps perform a NMU upload, anyone?
*some* packages, yes. From what I’ve read, Debian sid is much like Rawhide or Mandrake Cooker – packages which are important to the distro, or have a particularly attentive packager, go in faster than light speed. Slightly more neglected ones, or more complex packages, don’t always.
Well i’d just like to say im another gentoo to debian user. I got sick to death of compiling packages whenever i wanted something new, when i had alot of work on this was a major hassle *saying that though when i did have time it was great fun* after a brief period on Arch i settled with debian. Ive been so happy with debian that all my systems now run it, testing on my server and unstable on both my laptop and workstation (i tried unstable on the server but it killed it a couple of times, mostly my fault
) I have to agree though the laptop i was running gentoo on which i changed to debian seemed alot more snappier. I dont agree with the charge that debian is bloated, when i was running gentoo my / was 8gb and almost full, with debian (same programs, even more actually) and now my / is only 6gb and has 3gb free.
Ive also learnt more about manageing a server, how each program fits together etc since debian tbh. But that is just my experience, if you have time gentoo can be fun, if your working a long week, every week, prize goes to debian for me
Yup, the only optimization that makes sense is -s for size. Everything that takes time on a regular desktop today is disk I/O bound. And what can you do to reduce disk I/O? You can reduce swapping and load times. How do you reduce swapping and load times? Reduce the size of your executables and libraries.
Of course this doesn’t apply to things like blender or gimp or other raw-cpu heavy programs but for things like OpenOffice.org, xchat etc I see no reason to optimize for anything else than size.
Anyone got any?
I have yet to see any decent comparisions between using a binary package vs compiling from source.
I would have thought a gentoo’er somewhere would have jumped at the chance and produced a giant page somewhere proving just how much faster gentoo is then debian (in my opinion theres notable competition between gentoo and debian).
(I did come accross a comparision of debian/mandrake/gentoo, debian was the fastest in that one
)
I know such benchmarks would be highly dependant on what cpu, still, least we’d have some numbers to attribute to this claimed speed increase.
Lately I’ve been compiling a C++ project using -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer. After running the program a couple of times, I noticed the exception mechanism was completely FUBAR (catch() were not catching anything).
Apparently this is an old known bug of GCC that has only been recently fixed in unreleased branches (next releases of 3.3, 3.4 and 4.0).
This is not the first time that a program compiled with a simple optimization flag goes south. Take for example ODE, some parts of it wont work if compiled with something as simple as -O2.
To my experience, messing with the compilation flags when compiling the sources of a program (one that’s not yours) is always more troubles than it’s worth. Plus, 90% of the time, it’ll probably end up being slower (e.g. using the *evil* -O3); more than often -march actually made things slower than using the default i386 target.
IMHO, source based distros have one big advantage when it comes to new architectures. You don’t have to wait for every packages to be rebuild to 64 bits (but you still have to wait for the sources to be 64 bits compliant).
About a year ago, we got a Dual Opteron and tried to install Debian AMD64 on it with no luck. Currently, Gentoo is still running on it.
Although, I’m planning to try installing Debian AMD64 back on it, as it has matured quite a bit since back then.
“My point is that using -O2 on Debian would probably be enough for the cold shoulder”
I doubt it, seeing as how most of the official packages are built with -O2 in the first place.
“Get over it… they work fine. What exactly do you suggest people use, given that things like swsusp2, decent orinoco drivers and fbsplash aren’t included in vanilla kernels?”
As I said in my previous post: those are Ciaran McCreesh’s words, not my own. If you really want an answer, feel free to post to the forums or the -devel mailing list and take it up with him.
on the other hand, if your compiler goes south with the simplest optimisation flags like O2, you can assert it is a piece of crap, be it branded ‘GNU’ or not.
has gcc become a big issue, a bloated stowpipe, producing unpredictable results ? oh yes…
As no one seems to mention it;
an alternative way would be to use pkgsrc ( http://www.pkgsrc.org/ ) under Debian. It works fine for me, but it is not that fine tuned yet, you may encounter packages that wont compile cleanly under Linux within the first run, but things concentrate. It may be a try – because it gives you one framework for all your boxen (*BSD, Linux, Solaris, IRIX…). You can even NFS mount one /usr/pkgsrc across your network and share. Just try it out.
Just my 2 cents.
Cheers.
-dac