On Tue, May 13, 2003 at 03:34:08PM -0600, Rob Savoye wrote: > > General impressions are, what a great platform! Debian installed like a > champ, and each machine came up pretty efficiently. The only big problem I > had is GCC 2.96 sucks, and 3.0.4 isn't much better (We were running stable > woody). I finally had to go with a recent build I had done of GCC "3.4" from > a few weeks old CVS tree. The other versions kept having weird problems with > C++ and systems headers, which just "went away" using a more recent GCC. I had > to give up on our one XView based application (thanks to this list, now I > know why...) , but managed to get the new Java version up instead using > Sun's java for Redhat 7.3.
We have an rx2600 here running Debian, which is being used for grid computing research. We've had some moderate success using Intel's compiler rather than gcc/g++. The resulting code is *much* faster (of the order of double the performance). We've had some issues though - in particular, the Intel compiler does not like the C library headers for the glibc shipped with Debian 3.0 or Red Hat 8.0. However, we have hacked around this by installing a set of headers for an earlier glibc - the resulting binaries still seem to run fine with the newer glibc, and this will do as a hack-around until Intel support the newer C libraries. This is not an Itanium specific problem - the same thing happens on Debian-i386 systems. I've been a Debian fanatic for some time (if you look at the changelog for the Exim MTA in Debian, you'll see it was me who originally debianized it, several years ago) and I am slowly converting other people at my place of work. Like you, we are generally finding that it "just works", and this is especially refreshing on non-x86 architectures. We have Debian systems here based on Alpha, Itanium2 and x86. Tim [ OT: We see the same order of improvement in performance using the Intel compilers on x86 too, so for performance-dependent code we are now almost exclusively using Intel's compilers ] -- Dr Tim Cutts Informatics Systems Group Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
