Gentoo & the Intel Compiler

[MadEgg]

After reading the following thread: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=93405 I found out about the existence of an Intel compiler for Linux, and went browsing for it a bit.

From what I read I figure that ICC generates way faster code than GCC does. After trying 'emerge -s icc' I found out that ICC is even in portage.

Now my question: is it possible to make the portage system use ICC instead of GCC and are there many packages that won't compile/give problems when using ICC instead of GCC?

I'm running on an Intel x86 system so it would be cool if I could indeed benefit from a compiler written specially for my arch...
_________________
Pentium 4 Prescott 3,2 GHz
Asus P4P800 SE, i865PE chipset
1024 MB PC3200 RAM
AOpen Aeolus GeForce 6800 Ultra 256 MB DDR2
Creative Audigy2 ZS
gentoo-sources-2.6.20-r7
nVidia-drivers version 9755

[Helena]

as to your first question: there is a USE flag called "icc" specifically for that.

[MadEgg]

But a 'grep icc * -R' in /usr/portage shows that hardly any package uses it, none of them one of the greater/heavier packages.

Have all these packages actually been tested for compatibility with ICC or are just the ones that have been tested marked with 'icc'?

I suppose the latter, right?
_________________
Pentium 4 Prescott 3,2 GHz
Asus P4P800 SE, i865PE chipset
1024 MB PC3200 RAM
AOpen Aeolus GeForce 6800 Ultra 256 MB DDR2
Creative Audigy2 ZS
gentoo-sources-2.6.20-r7
nVidia-drivers version 9755

[Pythonhead]

[fumtu99]

After re-rsyncing yesterday, an "emerge -Up world" now reports there being a new version of the icc compiler, l_icc_p_7.1.030.tar, but the file doesn't exist on the Intel FTP site; is this a case of someone jumping the gun (perhaps because they've got a registered copy), or is this a problem with versioning of some sort?

James

[Moled]

there are quite a few packages that build with icc but no icc flag

and as said it takes different options, so something like an ICCFLAGS line in make.conf would be really nice