Newbie Feeling USED

[bdemore]

Well, Once again I'm doing a fresh install. Does anyone else feel compelled to break Gentoo every month or so just to re-optimize? Anyway, I've got a /etc/make.conf question. I'm installing a stage 1 on an Athlon XP system. I edited my USE flags and added the following optimizations: CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -m3dnow -msse -mfpmath=sse -mmmx -O3
-pipe -fforce-addr -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -frerun-cse-after-loop
-frerun-loop-opt -falign-functions=4 -maccumulate-outgoing-args -ffast-math
-fprefetch-loop-arrays"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
My question is this: Do I have to uncomment the settings referring to "J2", "rsync retries", and something about cleaning out stale distfiles? Sorry, my system is compiling so I'm doing this from memory. I think these settings are now a default but I uncommented them anyway. When I started to bootstrap, I got some beeps and a long message. It happened too fast to read but now I'm concerned that something went wrong. Any help would be appreciated.

[MaD-DaRiUs]

Hi,

well i'd be more worried about your CFLAGS breaking something than ather than those options you enabled
from what you describe i would say you uncommented the MAKEOPTS="-J2" AUTOCLEAN="yes" and RSYNC_RETRIES="3"
the first of which specifies the number of parallel makes that portage will do at once,
the second is already turned on in your make.globals and it just means that it will remave any stale versions of programs you have emerged,
and the third as its name imply's tell's Rsync to only try 3 times before failing, the last two options have no effect on your system whatsoever during the bootstrap phase,
and the first option above will probably decrease the amount of time it will take to bootstrap.
so all in all i'd be very surprised to find any of those options doing any harm, and i would look at your CFLAGS instead if there is a problem

Hope that Helps,

[jstuart]

I have an athlon XP and my cflags are just CFLAGS="-O2 -march=athlon-xp -pipe ". Note: no FANCY extra optimizations, no O3, etc. VERY VERY stable. No need to "break" gentoo once a month.
_________________
Jeff Stuart
JAHGU (Just another happy Gentoo User)

[phong]

Those settings have comments by them to say what they're for (most of the time, you leave them commented). The MAKEOPTS one is for multiprocessor systems, for example. Also, most of your optimizations are redundant, -march=athlon-xp implies all the -m options you added, and the -O3 implies most of the others. I would not recommend using any more than "-march=athlon-xp -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe", and I've heard of problems even using that (in combination with the athlon-xp flag). Many of those optimizations have the potential to break things. Also, see CFLAGS central for CFLAGS related questions.

You don't have to recompile your whole system every month - there's no gain to be had there.
_________________
"An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head."
-- Eric Hoffer

[bdemore]

Thanks for the replies. I was able to emerge and compile the base system with those flags but kde would not have it. At any rate, i got caught up in the uber-optimization thing and have now come back down to reality. I currently using the following optomizations:
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=athlon -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
CXXFLAGS="-march=athlon -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
I'm emerging the kernel now and will try kde tonight again. Thanks for the explanations.