Rumor has it that Justin The Cynical may have mentioned these words: >Roger Merchberger wrote: > > Rumor has it that Justin The Cynical may have mentioned these words: > > > >> Building from source isn't going to give much of a performance boost, > > > > You've obviously never owned a Crusoe processor-based computer, have you? > > ;-) Lemme tell ya, compiling for the architecture -- especially when > it's a > > *wonky* architecture -- can give you some serious performance gains.[1] > >Nope, I've not. However, I did qualify that statement with a 'most >people'. :-)
I thought I read "Most applications." Crusoe optimizations really do affect most (all?) applications, including web browsing & word processing. DVD playing was quite dramatic - Winders couldn't do it, and every Linux distro I tried (RedHat, SuSE, Slackware, even DSL) couldn't do it without dropping frames, glitchy audio (at best!) and pegging the CPU. Under LFS, I was playing full-screen video without a single dropped frame, perfect audio, and the CPU utilization was 40-60%... I was running PostgreSQL, Apache & ColdFusion serving a few (testing) webpages making use of all three, and still couldn't make the A/V skip. ;-) Even Firefox 1.0x went from "awright" as a preinstalled binary to "HolyMyGoodness!" once it was natively compiled. ;-) > > My 933Mhz Crusoe laptop benchmarked equivalent to about a 650-700MHz x86 > > processor - except in LFS, where it benchmarked about 1.3GHz! > >And that is impressive. I'm guessing that compiling for the chip >bypassed most, if not all, of the x86 emulation layer(s). Actually, no. It's built into the chip[1] - but AIUI when the x86 instructions come in "misaligned" to the way the chip wanted it, it would take quite a few cycles to reorder everything before it worked it's voodoo into the internal VLIW. Telling GCC how to streamline the process for what went where _really_ made a difference. But, the batteries are now shot, the LCD's backlighting is getting *tired* and so I ordered a dual-core Turion that I'm waiting to come in - to see just how schweet LFS will run on *that.* ;-) Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger [1] The strength of the Crusoe system is it could emulate *any CPU* pretty easily, FWIW.... and the chip was theoretically software-upgradeable. However, at the time Linus worked at Transmeta, they were asked if they were going to come out with a "Linux CPU" similar to the machines of yore that were designed from the ground up to run Forth or Lisp. They declined... which is too bad. I'd bet that chip would've *Rocked!* ;-) -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate." SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
