On Tue, 5 Aug 2003, Dave Airlie wrote:
> I'll throw my oar in with Jeff on this one.. (as another FOSS contributer)
>
> using Gentoo or LFS (scary thought) for a production Linux server is
> probably the dumbest thing you'll ever do involving Linux... the
> maintenance nightmare alone... gcc optimisation levels don't make a
> massive difference from a lot of real-world POVs, I'd like to see some
> useful real benchmarks but it still wouldn't be worth the hassle of a
> re-building everything from source just to get that small improvement..
> it would probably have to be worth 10-15% speed to make it worth the
> hassle.. you know you can also re-build RH and Debian with higher
> optimisations you could in theory get all the RH SRC RPM and --rebuild
> them with higher opts on ..
I've no experience with Gentoo, but I regularly build systems from source
with FreeBSD, and have been running production servers this way for years.
Using FreeBSD, this is not a maintenance hassle for a system with a single
experienced sysadmin, but where multiple admins are involved, and
particularly where that includes less experienced admins, flexibility of
approach ceases to be an advantage, and I tend towards using debian in
those cases.
I have had significant problems with debian systems where there has been a
policy of using only the official binary distributions. Like the time we
had a 3 week wait for a debian apache bugfix which was mission critical
for us in putting a new server into production. Apache fixed it quick,
but debian was slow to catch up. That was on a testing rather than stable
release, but then the stable release had a version of perl that was nearly
2 years old, and that would not have worked for us either.
Doing a build, or even an install from source is really not difficult if
the distribution's build system is good. On a modern machine it takes
less than an hour to compile a freebsd distribution, which is a good deal
larger than the core of most linuxes. You can spend a bit longer going
through ports, but its still not all that long.
> I don't even re-compile my kernel nowadays unless there is something
> seriously wrong with it, my standard desktop PC at work runs RH standard
> kernel, my laptop sometimes gets pre-release kernels but that's because I
> like ACPI on it...
It's needed less and less often, but there are some nice things you can do
by compiling with non-standard options, or even with a modified compiler.
Stack guards can save a lot of maintenance time if the prevent someone
running a buffer overflow attack. Not for everyone, but they have their
place.
> I'm not saying Gentoo et al don't have a place in the world, they do but
> that place is not running anything at a production/maintainable level,
> it's more a desktop for people with too much computing power and time on
> their hands or for someone who wants to learn how Linux distros work.....
> I think one point that Jeff may be thinking of saying (he may be yet too
> polite :-), is that you are wasting time that would be better spent doing
> something else with, install RH or Debian and use it for stuff, rather
> than waiting for Gentoo to re-build itself...
Fire it up and then get on with all that other stuff. It's not something
you do every day, and you don't have to sit there watching it.
Andrew McNaughton
--
No added Sugar. Not tested on animals. May contain traces of Nuts. If
irritation occurs, discontinue use.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew McNaughton In Sydney
Working on a Product Recommender System
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mobile: +61 422 753 792 http://staff.scoop.co.nz/andrew/cv.doc
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
