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Gentoo goes Binary

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#211

Post by nottorp »

1oooqooq wrote: post #62
nottorp wrote: post #54

Interesting that this is still going on. I haven't done it since Slackware came on floppies and you mostly had to recompile your kernel to get the right drivers in. Even did a linux from scratch once, later, to see how it goes. Then went along with my business.

wow. slackware is around since 93 and loadable modules since 95... i always remembered compiling drivers in to save RAM (i.e. i was more removing drivers than adding). But somewhere around kernel 1.2 we did have to compile driver modules in, indeed.

Linux was very new. I was in the last years of high school, 93-95 exactly. I couldn't even afford a 386 :)

A friend of mine got us access to one at the work place of a relative of his and we spent nights fiddling with Slackware. We even made a serial cable so I could log in via serial from the other computer in the office, which was only a 286.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#212

Post by trws »

goku12 wrote: post #6

Gentoo's big attraction for me is Portage. It goes beyond just providing a build environment and dependency management. Ebuilds (Gentoo packages) are supported by great tooling and Eclasses that handle a lot of corner cases in builds. Developing Ebuilds feel like doing a real software project, and is great for anyone who wants to experiment with packages that are not in the official repository. Coincidentally, I just…

Yeah, my CFLAGS won’t either. But I have to say I’m tempted to script something up so I can override all the plasma-related packages to use the common ones, or something similar, so I build everything where I care about speed myself and let the gui stuff be binary packages. Would save a whole lot of build time, and I’m not sure it would be much of a loss.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#213

Post by nottorp »

hermitdev wrote: post #203
II2II wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have heard of people recompiling the kernel to improve gaming performance (mostly to use a different scheduler or what be it), but don't recall seeing anything beyond single digit percentage improvements in performance. Which makes sense, since you can only recompile the kernel and a subset of open source libraries that the game may use. Those are going to be fairly well optimized to start with. The games themselve…

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a game developer and my exposure to commercial games' source has been very limited. The most exposure I've had was to Civ4 due to Firaxis releasing the source for the core game DLL for modding. Civ4 also used Python for scripting and Python (undeservedly, here) gets the blame for the game being slow, especially during late-game play. Back in the day, I spent a fair amount of ti…

Yeah but you picked the one game where some dude patched the civ 4 binary for a 3-4 x increase in rendering performance :)

Civ had been a 2d game until then, it was their first 3d title.

Not to mention that it was turn based strategy, and the main performance problem was AI turn length in the endgame.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#214

Post by lovecg »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #173
gtirloni wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I used to use Gentoo 20+ years ago; installing it was eye-opening. It helped me enormously to understand how Linux works. I then moved to debian/ubuntu and recently switched my main server to Arch. And you are right - I got back this feeling of having all my 10 fingers in the system and living on the bleeding edge. Now: this was probably not the brightest choice, as this server rund my docker containers and basically…

I did the hardcore path of Linux From Scratch and then discovered Gentoo which was a (very welcome) step down for customizability :) Highly recommend LFS for anyone who has a couple of hours per day to waste (i.e. young with no responsibilities)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#215

Post by Sesse__ »

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…

> Debian, the so-called "universal operating system" just dropped 32-bit x86 support.

This is imprecise at best. There was a meeting where the release team concluded that most likely, there will be no _installer_ and _kernel_ support for 32-bit x86 at some unspecified point in the future. (At the current point in time, both are still delivered and fully supported.) In particular, you can still run multi-arch 32-bit/64-bit, allowing you to run 32-bit x86 software.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#217

Post by pxc »

This mix of a binary cache for common compilation options with transparent fallback to source builds when flags are customized is how the youngest generation of source-based Linux distros (NixOS and GuixSD) work, and it's a really nice combination. Congrats to the Gentoo community! I think a lot of people will enjoy this kind of setup.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#218

Post by sergiomattei »

mad182 wrote: post #8
iamgopal wrote: post #3

Years ago, somehow, I wasted hours and days of computer and my time, compiling and fine tuning my gentoo system, god knows why, when next day I anyway format it to install newly arrived Ubuntu cd.

I too used to obsess over customizing my OS. Now I just install Debian, a handful of programs I use daily and that's it. I can recreate my setup on another machine in 20 minutes.

Same but with macOS.

The only cool thing about it is that it’s declarative: nix-darwin everything and a fully working and customized machine is up in 10 minutes with one command

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#219

Post by zymhan »

TrueDuality wrote: post #152
goku12 wrote: post #6

Gentoo's big attraction for me is Portage. It goes beyond just providing a build environment and dependency management. Ebuilds (Gentoo packages) are supported by great tooling and Eclasses that handle a lot of corner cases in builds. Developing Ebuilds feel like doing a real software project, and is great for anyone who wants to experiment with packages that are not in the official repository. Coincidentally, I just…

I agree on customizing the package flags, and features. When using Gentoo in production it became an important part of our security posture to omit the features and integrations with unused software. That being said we've always had a build host dedicated to producing binaries, but the actual support for binaries in Gentoo hasn't been great. Unsigned serving over HTTP or NFS of compiled artifacts is about all you get…

> omit the features and integrations with unused software.

That's one of the most compelling cases I've heard for running something like Gentoo in prod.

There are so many plugins, connectors, protocols, and often the old neglected ones turn into attack vectors.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#220

Post by chlorion »

Gentoo for me is not about compiling things from source, or "performance", or tweaking your OS for days, which seems to be the comment perception from people.

Now that there is an officially supported binhost, you do not have to compile anything if you don't want to. You can use a desktop profile with zero customization and have a system that works "out of the box". You do have the options to customize and compile but it's not required.

Gentoo's benefits for me include the tooling around portage and the PMS (package manager spec). Gentoo's software packaging tooling is (IMO) superior to what exists in Debian and other conventional (not nix) distros. The most similar would be Arch's PKGBUILDs, which are also pretty nice.

Packaging software for Debian, trying to create a .deb package is a fairly arcane process and the documentation was difficult to find and digest when I attempted this. Gentoo has a wiki section called "ebuild writing guide" that describes everything in great detail.

There are also benefits like being able to select on a per-package-basis whether you want "stable" or "unstable" versions of software. Gentoo is a rolling release distro, but requires packages to meet a certain criteria before being marked as "stable". You are not forced to use "stable" packages if you want the most recent releases from upstream (basically what Arch does) but still have access to them if you'd like.

Gentoo's community is the most important feature for me though. Gentoo feels like a proper open source project. You don't have to be a Gentoo developer to contribute, and you can interact directly with Gentoo developers when you need guidance or have questions. Gentoo's community seems to have a lot less elitism compared to other distros also which is very important to me.

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