Wow, some misinformation never dies. [LWN.net]

Wow, some misinformation never dies.

Posted Aug 31, 2006 12:47 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Wow, some misinformation never dies. by flewellyn
Parent article: Gentoo Linux 2006.1 released

That whole "Gentoo = ricer" thing is a load,

No, it's historically what Gentoo was. It used to have options like -funroll-all-loops which nobody would recommend, and -O4 which doesn't even exist with gcc.

The flexibility with USE flags is newer, and yes, it's neat. The thing is, if I'm on a reasonably modern machine, omitting build dependencies Gentoo-style doesn't really help that much (eg, I don't use gnome but I don't really care if firefox is built with gnome support). I may save 2% of the used disk space. While if I'm on an older, slower machine, compiling everything on it gets pretty tiresome. That, and when I used it last (some years ago) I managed to hose it twice while updating (it updated libc to an incompatible version breaking most of the system in the process). So I don't have much use for Gentoo, but obviously some people do.

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Wow, some misinformation never dies.

Posted Aug 31, 2006 17:12 UTC (Thu) by g2boojum (subscriber, #152) [Link]

>> That whole "Gentoo = ricer" thing is a load,

> No, it's historically what Gentoo was. It used to have options like
> -funroll-all-loops which nobody would recommend, and -O4 which doesn't even
> exist with gcc.

I could be wrong, but that doesn't agree with my recollection, and I've been using Gentoo since the 1.0_pre?? days. I remember using -O3 -pipe as the recommended default back then, and now we recommend -O2 -pipe. Yes, the current recommendation is more conservative, but not really by all that much. (It is also worth remembering that back then many distros compiled their software for i386 by default, so optimizing w/ march=i686 actually did make a noticeable difference.)

Wow, some misinformation never dies.

Posted Sep 3, 2006 14:40 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The `more conservative' recommendation is both faster and smaller on
register-poor platforms like x86, and to some extent on x86_64 as well.