FreeBSD From Scratch

geekmedia writes "Daemon News has an excellent article which describes a fully automated installation of a customized FreeBSD system compiled from source, including compilation of all your favorite ports and configured to match your idea of the perfect system. If you think make world is a wonderful concept, FreeBSD From Scratch extends it to make universe."

Comments

I Don't Get It

[minusthink]

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with binary distributions? What's with the recent rise in all these source based, do it from source distributions?

I'm not criticizing, I'm asking.

Is there really a *significant* increase in speed to justify the hours in CPU time to recompile everything with unrolling loops and athlon-tbird or whatever specific code?

futurama is on. I have to go!

similarity to OpenBSD

[sawanv]

Can anyone please tell me how similar this is to a fresh OpenBSD install, as I am thinking of doing one. Sawan

For Gentoo, though

[jsse]

Is there really a *significant* increase in speed to justify the hours in CPU time to recompile everything with unrolling loops and athlon-tbird or whatever specific code?

Yes if 19% is significant enough for you. :)

Quote from the link:

vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
gcc version 3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)

Result: '-O3 -march=athlon-mp -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -fforce-mem -s -funroll-loops -frerun-loop-opt -fdelete-null-pointer-checks -fprefetch-loop-arrays -ffast-math -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fschedule-insns'

Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 19.6%

Warning: read my warning in the post before using these flags

Of course, you need to justify the time taken to benchmark individual optimization flag to yield such a result. It took me a day to obtain a optimal CFLAG and another week to fully optimize a system. :)

Older processors gain less performance boost over source optimization. I've little problem boosting a newer box to 19% and beyond.(compare to normal -O3 compilation).

There're few stability issues(if you'd take my warning down my post), but it's still good for desktop processing(games!). For servers I would not risk it and use some other binary-distro instead.

Of course, it's up to you. If you think you need extra performance boost for your production servers and you've management justification and you've given enough resources to test, why not. :)

Re:Why?

[TheRaven64]

but honestly that could just be because that's what I learned first.

Having learned Linux first, then tried BSD, I can say that (at least in my experience) this is not true. I find FreeBSD a lot nicer to use. The documentation is also far superior to anything I've seen on Linux. It also lacks the fragmentation of the Linux community, where a Mandrake rpm may not work on a RedHat box etc. Installing software, upgrading the system, and keeping it current are much easier under BSD, and it hasn't (yet) defaulted to the 'install everything the user might possibly think about using' philosophy present in a lot of Linux distros.

Re:Let's see, who could it be, could it be...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you are trying to be funny, but it is not so funny when you try to deal with your pastor.
Our pastor isn't crazy about Halloween let alone a devil mascot in his computer.