[plug] Distro Day2 Saturday 11th Oct 10am

[Craig Ringer]

>>>3)Mandrake was included because it is delivered from the factory with
>>>optimizations for more advanced chips, so should be the fastest commersial
>>>distro.
> 
> I should have said the most "optimised for faster chips" commercial distro,
> therefore probably the fastest.
> 
> Having said all that, the results, (which are on www.linmagau.org, as Scott
> pointed out), tend to show that optimization is the enemy of speed on those
> boxes. Debian did surprisingly well, fighting for top place with MDK
> (IIRC), with Gentoo trailing by quite a bit (in THESE tests on THESE
> boxes).

I seem to remember that Mandrake is compiled for i586. Unfortunately, 
AFAIK everything but the original Pentium (not even Pentium MMX) runs 
i586 code slower than i486 code :-( . Something to do with weird 
instruction ordering requirements in the original Pentium, I think.

A common concensus is that a kernel capable of using your processor 
well, plus glibc built for your general processor family (i686 should be 
fine for ppro, P2, P3, P4, k7 and k8) is probably all you need. 
Benchmarks are, of course, scarce. Personally I've seen results 
rebuilding XFree86 as well, but the pain is generally not worth the gain.

Craig Ringer


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