To those that were following the "rebuild" thread last week: Just wanted to share with the list that I was able to rebuild most of the SRPMS for Red Hat 7.3 as optimized for the i686 platform. Took me a few days to get it done. I skipped a few packages due to previous experience stating that they wouldn't work well initially (the perls) or to save time since they were already done (kernel, openssl, etc.).
Unfortunately I lost my spare compiling machine halfway through the project (office needed it elsewhere) so I had to get creative. All I had was an 8.0 box that I use to serve updated packages to my network. I didn't want to dual boot it and lose a server for a few days. Therefore I took the drive from my "build box", put it into my "update" server, mounted the partitions into a subdirectory, then chrooted myself there. Voila! Instant valid 7.3 "platform" - libraries and all. Note - this 7.3 "drive" had an "everything" install to ensure that the "most" packages would build w/o complaining of dependencies. I also updated the SRPMS directory with updated errata packages so I was building Red Hat's latest and greatest. To get this done, I created a list of my SRPMS, edited the list to remove the specific packages I didn't want to rebuild (kernel because it was already done and the various "perls" because of previous issues), then used the following script: for x in `cat listfile`; do if [ ! -f /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i686/`echo $x | sed s/src/i686/g` ]; then rpmbuild --rebuild --target i686-redhat-linux-gnu $x; fi; done (if statement used to prevent rebuilding packages that I may have already built previously - not all inclusive but does save some work). Some packages failed to build. Fortunately they weren't critical packages or packages that I use often, but it still annoys me for now. I'll look more into those later. Here's a thought - what about Red Hat's build platform would be different than an "all inclusive" Red Hat 7.3 install? If I could reproduce it, perhaps I would have better success at building the rest of the packages. Anyway, once completed, I then added the resulting i686.rpm packages (minus the silly man page/docs/manuals/fonts only packages - why did those build as i686?) to my install tree and reran genhdlist. I then attempted a network install to another i686 machine (which conveniently became available but only for a day). Note - during the install process, anaconda will pick the i686 rpms if your platform matches (i686 or athlon). Hence when I was done, I had a machine that was mostly i686 optimized. Results? Gnome felt a bigger improvement than KDE, but I did notice a slight but noticeable speed improvement under both GUI's. Other binaries I noticed a slight improvement with were PHP and other "interpretive languages" (which is why I'd like to get perl working). Unfortunately I don't have 2 identical machines or I'd benchmark the two in order to quantify the differences. I still need to spend some time w/ the packages to ensure that they're going to function the same as the Red Hat provided i386 packages - a QA if you will. It concerns me that under a "full" install that not all packages would build properly, which is causing me to be cautious of the ones that did. Once I'm more satisfied w/ the results, I'll consider deploying the packages onto production machines to see if there's a notable improvement. My next task will be to create a Red Hat 8.0 "everything" install to build 8.0 compatible i686 packages. I'm sure this could easily be done for i586 or athlon platforms as well if you have the time and ambition. Hope this helps others who had considered the same task. To the rest - I do apologize for the rambling :-) -Rick -- Rick Johnson, RHCE - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Linux/WAN Administrator - Medata, Inc. (from home) PGP Key: https://mail.medata.com/pgp/rjohnson.asc -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=unsubscribe https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
