[oclug] My Current Gentoo Setup

[Tim Hosking]

Dan Cardamore wrote:

>As far as performance is concerned, gentoo is noticably faster.  I
>wonder if it has anything to do with the preemptive patches in the
>kernel since gentoo-sources has the -ac patch applied.
>
I suspect it has more to do with the fact that you have built the entire 
system on your machine, for your machine.

I have the following in my /etc/make.conf on my dual Athlon workstation:

CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -mcpu=i686 -fforce-addr 
-fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop 
-frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4"
CXXFLAGS="-march=i686 -O3 -pipe -mcpu=i686 -fforce-addr 
-fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop 
-frerun-loop-opt -malign-functions=4"

As soon as GCC 3.0 is released and stable, I will of course change 
-march & -mcpu to athlon :)

These optimisations were there right from the bootstrap phase of the 
install. When building the kernel during the initial install (which was 
still running the kernel & compiler from the CD) it took 6 minutes 40 
seconds. After everything was built, I had to rebuild the kernel again 
to correct a couple of things. This time it was running entirely from 
the system built with the above flags. It took 3 minutes 30 seconds to 
build a big, fat workstation kernel.

I would assume that the preemptive patches are also in the kernel on the 
CD, but who knows?

>I don't think I would recommend gentoo for a server install because it
>would take forever to repair a problem.  If you got hacked, I wouldn't
>want to have 24 hours of downtime to do a reinstall :)  For desktop
>though, it is excellent.
>  
>
It is excellent as a server! Not only is it fast, but there are a couple 
of nice little kernel tweaks (see the GrSecurity section in make 
menuconfig) which help to harden the system. Also, the nice person who 
put together the ebuild for the Bind DNS was kind enough to install it 
in a chroot jail right out of the box. I think that there is a script in 
/usr/portage/scripts that will build binary distros for you. That may 
help speed up reinstalls if you really think that is an issue.

Have fun!

-- 
Tim Hosking