[ale] Which Distro should I use?

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Thursday 30 January 2003 11:35 am, Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> > On Thursday 30 January 2003 09:13 am, ChangingLINKS.com wrote:
> > > 1. Is Gentoo "faster?"
> >
> > Yes.  All packages get compiled for your specific hardware with as
> > much speed optimization as possible.  You will see more speed-ups on a
> > p4 than on a 486.
>
> Does Gentoo or anybody else hyping the "compiled for your hardware"
> marketing fluff actually have benchmarks showing speed increases? I'm
> curious b/c I know both Caldera^WSCO and Red Hat have done internal tree
> builds optimized for the exact CPU and found that in most cases it makes
> no difference. Debian's currently in the process of rebuilding all of
> Sid compiled with i686 optimization to see whether its worth doing, but
> it'll be a few weeks before those results are available....

All I can give you is my hands on impression which is that gentoo is more 
responsive than mandrake on my laptop.  But that is not a benchmark.

> I'd be kinda surprised if it actually makes a difference for most
> packages; gcc is fairly sucky at optimizing for specific chipsets....
>
> > RH is compiled for a 486, so it doesn't take advantage of many
> > possible optimizations.
>
> Wrong. Overall, Red Hat is compiled with i686 ordering optimization, but
> using only i386+ compatible instructions. If you're familiar with gcc
> target specification, Red Hat is compiled with:
>
> gcc -mcpu=i686 -march=i386
>
> so it runs optimally on i686, but still will execute on 386, 486, 586,
> K6-2, Cyrix, Athlon, etc. cpus.

That's good information.  Thanks.  I didn't know that.

Michael
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