On Mon, Sep 29, 2003 at 05:49:59PM +0100, Stroller wrote: > Why is Gentoo's ability to set CFLAGS optimisations in make.conf so > widely touted, then..? > Surely if what you say is true, then this is a redundant feature of > portage.
Not redundant, it just gives you complete control. It's up to you to decide if it buys you anything on your particular platform with your particular hardware and software. > I was thinking of installing Portage on my Mac; if what you say is > true, then I guess I'm as well off with Fink..? Fink works fine. If you install binary packages, you're counting on the developer to have set the settings to something sane for the platform. Just like Debian. Unless you rebuild with fink and set things yourself, which would be more like Portage/Gentoo. :-) There have been numerous studies about whether or not compiling various applications and/or the whole system with system-specific architecture and speed settings derives much benefit on x86 platforms -- you can find them through Google. Generally if you're seeing more than a 5% gain in performance on any platform after compiling everything for the platform and with optimizations instead of the vanilla 386 compile, you're doing great. Heavy graphics/math take advantage of extended instruction sets in higher-end processors, if the GCC team have implemented them. Perhaps you might find an interest in benchmarking the real-world results of some of the pre-built packages for PPC vs. roll-your-own and figuring out what works the very fastest, if you're into speed. The average user will find more performance gains out of adding RAM to just about any system/platform than they'll see out of compiling for the architecture, though. -- Nate Duehr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
