[lug] Various Arch/Compiler Binaries living together

[Nate Duehr]

inline below...

> Does anyone remember the Stampede Linux distro?  One of their:
>
>   http://www.stampede.org/
>
> main goals was to provide a distro that was compiled with all
> optimizations (-O3 + architecture-specific stuff) turned on.  They
> targeted the i686 and Athlon platforms rather than providing more
> general i[3-5]86 binaries.  I met a few of the main developers at a
> conference in NYC 2-3 years ago and, at the time, I thought it was a
> fairly neat idea.

This was Mandrake's original "purpose" in life, also.  They've continued to
support only Pentium class machines and above, but it's not a "selling
point" for them much anymore.

> Since then, I've become convinced that fussing with platform-specific
> compilation and optimization tweaks is almost always a waste of time.  I
> don't have any URLs at the moment to back this up, but here it is:  If
> you aren't doing CPU-intensive work (eg. number crunching, audio/video
> en-/de-coding, etc.) then the optimization tweaks are a *total waste*.
> Depending upon the tweaks used, they will bloat the code while giving
> you <10% improvement (any typically less than 1-3%) on the vast majority
> of open source projects.  From an investment point of view, you won't
> even get your re-compilation time and effort back in amortized run-time
> savings!

Agreed.

> If you really want to speed up some code, buy a faster machine or pick a
> project that you think is "slow" and work with the developers to
> implement better algorithms and/or data structures.  Yes, thats either
> expensive or a lot of work.  But both of those approaches will actually
> accomplish something whereas re-compiling stuff with optimization tweaks
> is (again, for most general codes) an exercise in futility...

Those are interesting approaches.  Very few people REALLY understand that's
the purpose of having the source open and available, though... heh.

Another approach would be to fire up Gentoo Linux, and set it to do the
optimizations to a "reasonable" level, since you build the entire distro
from source anyway... (GRIN).

--
Nate, nate at natetech.com