One helluva plunge...

[wolfwings]

cdimage root # fdisk /dev/hda

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 7299.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
   (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/hda: 60.0 GB, 60040544256 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors per track, 7299 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 1 17 136251 83 Linux
/dev/hda2 18 267 2008125 82 Linux swap
/dev/hda3 268 7299 56484540 83 Linux

Command (m for help): q

The long and short of it is... I downloaded GenToo linux, and did a full-throttle, stage-1 install. What's this mean to the average user?

Everything, right down to the compile to compile everything else with, was compiled natively on the system. Not a single binary was downloaded.

Why? I felt like finally ridding myself of the last traces of MicroSoft on my system, primarilly. I'd had it still installed for one reason, to play Half-Life on, but Half-Life runs under Windows emulation quite well now.

Secondarilly, why a 'compile everything' install? Simple. 99% of binary packages are installed with the equivilant of debugging turned on, and optimizations (especially expensive, compile-time-intensive ones, and those for newer CPUs) turned off, so there are fewer binaries to deal with.

Guess what? I have a dual-processor Athlon-MP system. Nearly top of the line even by today's standards, though not quite up to the clock-rate of the current batch of Athlon-MPs available.

And I can say this already... comparing Mozilla Firebird binaries downloaded from their website before, to those compiles at the proper optimizations for my system, single-handedly trimmed memory usage by 10-20%, and roughly than doubled the speed, at least.

So was it worth the 10+ hours it took to install Linux this time? You betcha, almost everything is showing the same types of speed-ups Mozilla has.

And I thought my machine was fast before... =^.^=

Comments

[alari.livejournal.com]

Which level of optimization did you use? =)

The obvious choice...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

-march=athlon-mp -O3 -fexpensive-optimizations

Always found it curious that -fexpensive-optimizations is a completely, 100% safe set of optimizations, that are never turned on at any -O level simply because they are SO expensive, computation-wise, they can double the compile time in a worst-case, and only give a collective 5-10% speed increase.

Re: The obvious choice...

[alari.livejournal.com]

So you're trading a 50% speedup during compile for a 5-10% slowdown for the lifetime of that operating system install? :> Hrm... ;) (I'll definitely have to use them, er, next time I compile something. ^.^ wish I had a 'play' server. ;)

Re: The obvious choice...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Not QUITE...

More like stuff that finishes tasks, on average, in 50-75% of the normal time, in exchange for sitting through a 20-hour-plus install.

I'm still compiling Gnome. =^.^=

Then I'm almost entirely done though, just snag MozillaFirebird, Wine, and DOSEMU, and I'm pretty much set. :-)