Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FreeBSD From Scratch

Posted by timothy on from the and-scratch-don't-mean-nothin' dept.

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."

2 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Some things from experience by Sevn · · Score: 5, Informative

    I found the article of little use at all for a few
    reasons:

    I think I've had an installworld fail ONCE in 7
    years, and I think it was because I hadn't noticed
    that the make buildworld failed.

    As far as cruft in the OS laying around, I had a
    system that went from 2.2.8 to 4.0 stable with no
    problems. Part of the love of freebsd is not having to wipe partitions.

    To sum things up, most of the people I know that
    have had weird problems with things laying around
    don't do two very important things:

    #1 Run mergemaster

    #2 Read /usr/src/UPDATING

    As far as I'm concerned, the article this story
    references is completely pointless. :)

    --
    For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
  2. For Gentoo, though by jsse · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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. :)