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Gentoo goes Binary

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#191

Post by fl0ki »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #140

Say what you will about Gentoo as a concept, it was a lot of fun when I was 17 learning more about software packaging, distributed compilation, and the ins and outs of compile-time optimization, not to mention Linux kernel optimization. And their community had pretty nice docs from what I recall. I think a few of my patches are still knocking around in some releases. I finally realized all the tweaking and optimizati…

CPU-specific optimization has waxed and waned in importance over the years. It used to be that a lowest common denominator compilation would not even include MMX or SSE, which could make a huge difference for some kinds of CPU-bound algorithms. However, it was always possible to do a runtime CPU feature detection and run the optimal version, so compile time feature selection was not the only option.

Then AMD Opteron came out and got everyone on a new baseline: if you compiled for amd64 then that meant a specific CPU again, there were no newer instructions yet. Now AMD64 has several levels[1] which can start to matter for certain kinds of operations, such as SIMD. A more mundane one I often run into is that v2 added popcnt which is great for things like bitsets in isolation, but in overall program performance I measure almost no difference on any of my projects between v1 and v3.

When it comes to games, it's more than likely your games were binary-only and already compiled for the lowest common denominator and maybe used runtime feature selection, and even then, they were probably GPU-bound anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#192

Post by colordrops »

gtirloni wrote: post #170
connorgutman wrote: post #166

Disclaimer: I am a die-hard Gentoo fan. The appeal of Gentoo is not compiling everything from source, it's having the freedom to install anything you want on nearly any hardware all with stellar documentation and minimal roadblocks. Want to run Enlightenment with OpenRC and NetworkManager on a laptop from 2008? Install Gentoo! Want ZFS as root on a smart refrigerator? Install Gentoo! Want a vanilla Gnome + SystemD in…

I feel like the Gentoo userbase has been stolen in part by Arch these days.

And NixOS. The fact that Nix has had a binary cache was one of the reasons I chose it over Gentoo.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#194

Post by sramsay »

gtirloni wrote: post #170
connorgutman wrote: post #166

Disclaimer: I am a die-hard Gentoo fan. The appeal of Gentoo is not compiling everything from source, it's having the freedom to install anything you want on nearly any hardware all with stellar documentation and minimal roadblocks. Want to run Enlightenment with OpenRC and NetworkManager on a laptop from 2008? Install Gentoo! Want ZFS as root on a smart refrigerator? Install Gentoo! Want a vanilla Gnome + SystemD in…

I feel like the Gentoo userbase has been stolen in part by Arch these days.

Also a die-hard Gentoo fan (daily driver for 20+ years).

I tried Arch and what astounded me the most is that the docs didn't seem as good as Gentoo's. That surprised me because I end up looking at Arch's docs all the time and it's all of a very high quality.

But the Gentoo Handbook is really a masterpiece. I've never read a clearer explanation of how to go from unformatted disks to a working system.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#195

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

1oooqooq wrote: post #63
chpatrick wrote: post #53

I think NixOS has kind of taken over anything I would use Gentoo for.

you build "impure" (in nixos speak) packages for all your software? if not this is not a close comparisson. gentoo shines when you need system wide control of build flags (for perf or security)

> gentoo shines when you need system wide control of build flags

I'm pretty sure nixos can do that, though?

There's this for CFLAGs on a single package:

    nix-shell -p 'hello.overrideDerivation (old: { NIX_CFLAGS_COMPILE = "-Ofoo"; })' --run "hello --version"
And this page seems to talk about overriding settings for all of nixpkgs, and even something kind of like USE flags (although I agree that it's way less powerful and generic than USE flags; that's one place Gentoo wins): https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/nixpkgs-overriding-packag...

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#196

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

entropie wrote: post #59
totallywrong wrote: post #34

I remember Gentoo taking more than a full day to compile on my computer back then. It did teach me a lot though, will always have a soft spot for it.

Yeah, A day was pretty normal. I installed gentoo on a workmachine at a new job, like a dual xeon something with 64gb ram back in a time where 8gb ram on a worstation was plenty. I had a blast. It took "only" like 3 hours to get my usual to go system. Unfortunately I need haskell on my workstation (xmonad) and ghc can easily take alone like 5-20+ hours compile time on older computers. I compiled ghc a few times on an…

Yeah, IME it's always a tiny number of packages; IIRC my system only took a day to build because webkit took most of that time, and I didn't even try to compile firefox. (In fact, some of my setup retains the expectation of running firefox from a tarball from Mozilla specifically because I used to run gentoo)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#197

Post by pjmlp »

poszlem wrote: post #161
pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time I wasted with Gentoo in 2004 was enough to never try it again. A full day compiling stuff only for the base install, let alone everything else I would eventually need. On my case, I decided to become another Scientific Linux tester.

The time I "wasted" with Gentoo in 2005 taught me enough about how Linux works to land me my first real IT job. I will forever be grateful to that distribution.

Sure, but you didn't need to suffer compiling stuff from scratch to know how UNIX works.

I used first Xenix in 1993-1994, and naturally wasn't compiling it from scratch.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#198

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

graphe wrote: post #39
yung_steezy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is unfair - Arch is also meme'd by linux enthusiasts and 4chan. Additionally, Gentoo is the largest distro with the source-based package manager USP. I suppose you could take issue with that approach for reasons like the systemd maintainer does where he claims it wastes CPU-cycles and time. Personally I disagree with that assessment since reproducible builds are a vital part of FOSS.

Fun fact is that Gentoo is the most normie distro. ChromeOS is based on Gentoo and all have coreboot. I'm not disparaging it as much as seeing it as a similar learning tool.

ChromeOS is a gentoo derivative, but I struggle to describe a system as being gentoo if portage isn't available in the final image.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#199

Post by pjmlp »

II2II wrote: post #160
pjmlp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even 1-2 hours is too much for me. I rather use programming languages ecosystems that favour binary libraries for a reason.

A lot of the reason depends upon what you hope to get from the labour and the overall environment that you are working within. I was working with a 486 around 1995. Compiling your own software was the norm and compiling your own kernel could have significant performance benefits (even if it was just to conserve the limited memory supported by machines of the day, to head off some of the swapping). By the time I learn…

It surely wasn't the norm for me, in 1995's Summer, I got my first Linux distribution via Slackware 2.0, everything was already compiled and when chosing to download tarballs I would rather pick already compiled ones.

Later on, to take advantage of my Pentium based computer, I would get Mandrake, with its i585 optimized packages.

Most of my Linux based software would be sourced via Linux magazines CD-ROMs, or Walnut Creek CD-ROM collections.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#200

Post by juped »

gavinhoward wrote: post #86

Wow...I feel weird. A lot of the comments are saying that they tried Gentoo or used to use it. And here I am, using it as my daily driver and server workhorse. I wonder what makes me different such that Gentoo is the best for me. And I am not going to enable binary packages.

Extensive binary packages would have been nice back in the years when Gentoo was a meme OS; CPUs were a lot slower and not multicore. I don't have a use for them now.

Anyway, the best OS is the one you already know how to use.

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