On 12:24 Mon 07 Feb , Stroller wrote: > > > The closest Gentoo stage was i486, and on such a slow old system it would be > nice to squeeze out any extra performance I can.
Well, what I'm currently in the process of trying to do (not because I have an actual need for it, but rather out of experimentation) is taking a Gentoo i486 stage3 tarball and turning it into a i586 one. I realized that on the i686 host I am using, I can just let catalyst loose on an official Gentoo i486 or i686 tarball and, with the appropriate settings, have it build a new and more current tarball out of it. Fine. However, what certainly doesn't work is taking one of these stage3 tarballs (i486 or i686) and have catalyst build an i586 tarball out of that. In my attemts when trying this, catalyst first compiled a new glibc with i586, and the next thing it tried was building a new zlib with using the i586 glibc and the still i486 gcc and other stuff, which resulted in failure (don't have the exact error message anymore, but it was along the lines of the linker complaining about not being able to determine SONAME of libz.so). So what would probably work and what I'll try in the next days is the following: Unpack i486 tarball, chroot into it, and then manually try to make a i586 tarball out of it. That would probably involve the process described in the Gentoo "how to change your CHOST" document. I guess that once I've "prepared" such an i586 stage3 manually, I can regularely let catalyst handle updating it, just as it does fine with the original i486 and i686 stage3's. Again, I'm only doing this out of curiosity to see if it works and / or what problems I encounter and to learn some stuff; I'm probably never going to use the resulting stage3 tarball on my own machines, as Gentoo's i486 and i686 ones suit me just fine and I'm not a big performance tuner / tweaker. Still, if I succeed and if anyone is interested, I could certainly make me i586 stage3 available for download. I've also, just for fun, looked at a i386 stage3. However, while that would technically certainly also be possible, it seems that Gentoo's glibc ebuild is specifically set up to bail out when building on i386. That would probably even be fixable by not building with nptl, but that way it would only be possible to built something that would make problems when using the normal portage tree and coming into a situation where it wants to build a new (nptl-enabled) glibc for the first time, not to mention that I don't have a clue what other stuff would break when the user tries to install it from portage on a system that comes with a glibc I've "hacked" to come without nptl. Greetings, Nils -- Nils Holland * Ti Systems, Wunstorf-Luthe (Germany) Powered by GNU/Linux since 1998
