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NewbieTim
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Joined: 18 Apr 2002
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 6:08 pm    Post subject: Optimization for Athlon CPUs ?? Reply with quote

Hi,

does the optimization also affect Athlon CPUs or is a feature to turn on optimization for Athlon CPUs ??
And btw...how do i remove my existing Suse the best way to prepare my system for a Gentoo install??
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freefall
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Joined: 13 Apr 2002
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 6:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You can choose level of optimization in /etc/make.conf. There are several examples there, just uncomment the optimization you want. The file is easy to understand.

I would just backup what I want to keep from the Suse install and boot with the Gentoo cd. You can wipe out the Suse install with fdisk during installation.
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 6:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

newbie,

Yes the optimizations effect the Athlon CPU's, but there are no Ahtlon ONLY optimizations... if you are hunting for the wholey-grail of optimizations, I'd encourage you to do what freefall said and just uncomment the optimization lines in the /etc/make.profiles/make.defaults file (etc/make.conf is a deprecated way to change the settings).

I know you'll see people on this forum with stuff like:
-funroll -fblah blah blah -f blhasdkjlq2kjasd

and lots of other optmizations, trust me, the ones in that config file (-03 -march=i686 -pipe) are more than enough, the -03 turns on an ungodly amount of optimizations as is. Also, turning on loop unrolling and frame pointer opts make the compiles take considerably longer and don't provide any noticable performance (that I could tell on my Athlon XP 2000+)

As far as backing up Suse... if you just need to save some configs and files and stuff, try and dump them on disk or my favorite, an FTP site, otherwise I can't help. I always just cream my data when I install a new OS (since I burn it to CD).
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rsk
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I was wrong about that whole /etc/make.conf thing


clarification:
/etc/make.profile/make.defaults has all the default settings, DON'T EDIT THIS

/etc/make.conf is where you enter values that can OVERRIDE values from make.defaults via the "-" operator...

For example, in make.defaults, there is "gnome" in the use line, I don't use gnome, so in my make.conf on the USE="" line I added -gnome so it looks like:

USE="-gnome"

now gnome support isn't autocraptastically compiled into things.
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rsk
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh yea... the "guest" reply 2 posts up was me... that is what I ment when I said "I was wrong"
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NewbieTim
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Backing up the data of my Suse isn't the problem...i just want to know if i should delete everything/fdisk everything..etc...
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rsk
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh yea.. you should. I suggest using XFS as the file system, its impressively fast (also use metalog as your logger, smallest overhead, unless you care a lot about logging).

Make it clean! :)

it honestly only takes about a minute to mkfs a 40gig drive, I did it twice yesterday.
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NewbieTim
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

And should (or can) I fdisk the partition during the installation or doesnt that matter...?? I just quickly went through the installation guide so sorry for my lame questions..
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rsk
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 7:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

no prob... print the guide out, its really good.

when you boot from the cd (burn the huge iso, 130meg so you can boot from it, but USE stage1 off of the cd, so you can compile EVEYRTHING)

and yes, just read through the document from step 1 - 12871283974123 (not really that long), but it holds your hand perfectly. I did this install for the first time 3 days ago, and have done it 4 times already (I'm fighting with my nForce board, but got it working just fine with the nVidia drivers and the correct kenerl config).
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freefall
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 8:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

rsk wrote:

when you boot from the cd (burn the huge iso, 130meg so you can boot from it, but USE stage1 off of the cd, so you can compile EVEYRTHING)


You can boot from the small (16mb) iso too. If you are gonna do a stage1 install there's really no reason to get the big iso.

NewbieTim wrote:
And should (or can) I fdisk the partition during the installation or doesnt that matter...?? I just quickly went through the installation guide so sorry for my lame questions..


You can fdisk during install. That's what I would do.
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rsk
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 8:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

oh I didn't know the small one was bootable, thx!
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hyperstation
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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2002 9:58 pm    Post subject: gcc 3 Reply with quote

...i think GCC 3 has athlon specific optimizations (someone who knows can verify that maybe?)
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 12:35 am    Post subject: Re: gcc 3 Reply with quote

hyperstation wrote:
...i think GCC 3 has athlon specific optimizations (someone who knows can verify that maybe?)


Yes, gcc >= 3.0 can generate Athlon specific code (compiler flag --march=athlon). But be warned that gcc 3 is still buggy and much more strict in regard to ISO C++ than gcc 2. That means that much software fails to compile with gcc 3.0 which compiles fine with gcc 2. For example vanilla gcc 3.0.4 fails to compile KDE 3 (at least in parts). BTW, the patched gcc 3.0.4's from Redhat Rawhide and Mandrake Cooker compile KDE 3 without problems. With the (also patched) gcc 3.1 from Mandrake KDE 3 becomes very unstable.

Have fun,
Andreas
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Guest






PostPosted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 4:01 am    Post subject: gentoo, gcc3, and athlons Reply with quote

I got this to work with the -march=athlon in make.conf but to get it to work I had to use -march=i686 to bootstrap gcc3 since gcc 2 doesn't understand that flag. I changed the flag after doing the bootstrap.sh so I probably didn't get all the optimizations but my system's been very happy and stable for the past couple of weeks. 'Course, I run a real window environment: WindowMaker. :)
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TeraTorn
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 1:43 pm    Post subject: Athlon + GCC 3.0 Reply with quote

I read an article that benchmarked GCC 3 against 2.95.3 on an Athlon, GCC SUCKS HARD on an Athlong due to some Pentium optimizations... Sorry, youll have to google the article yourself... also last time I tried, GCC 3 build a broken kernel, so I'm just sticking with good old 2.95.3 for now...
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Guest






PostPosted: Fri Apr 19, 2002 2:36 pm    Post subject: Re: Athlon + GCC 3.0 Reply with quote

TeraTorn wrote:
GCC SUCKS HARD on an Athlong due to some Pentium optimizations...


Well, of course you have to use Athlon optimizations for an Athlon, not Pentium opztimizations. BTW, I never read a benchmark which came to the conclusion "GCC sucks for Athlon" and believe me I read a lot of benchmarks and have done some by myself. Things are more difficult. There are a lot of examples where gcc 3.0 generates better code than gcc 2. Then there are cases where gcc 3.0 generates worse code then gcc 2. It depends on the specific code. Also note that performance had no priority for gcc 3.0 development. Gcc 3.1 will see more optimizations.
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