Measuring The Benefits Of The Gentoo Approach

An anonymous reader writes "We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware, but no-one seems to have really tested it. What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging? The article is here."

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[Anonymous Coward]

6.2 - Distro Day (Measuring the benefits of the Gentoo approach)
Contributed by Indranath Neogy

A gallery of photos from the day can be found .. here
First of all, a big thankyou to Evolution Xtreme for the loan of the hardware and to Scott Middleton of Linux IT for all his help arranging the test.

Scott gets the credit for thinking of this test. He said "We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware, but no-one seems to have really tested it. What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging?" He arranged with Evolution Xtreme for the loan of 3 identical machines to test with.
Creating the Test
Obviously, the most direct way to test the compile time optimisations of Gentoo is to compile 3 Gentoo systems with different settings and then compare them. However, this really misses some of the story. Each distro has it's own attitude to the kernel and whilst it may be i386 or i586 compiled, it will have had some adjustments made to it. In reality, few people will be choosing to install Gentoo with less than recommended optimisations for their system. They are interested in a tradeoff between optimization and convenience. Thus, we aimed to compare Gentoo with an i386 based distro and an i586 based distro. With the assistance of some PLUG members we decided on Debian as the i386 candidate and Mandrake as the i586, in part as those were the options where people were available to do the install.

# The following tests were outlined: Time to open a large sheet in Gnumeric.
# Time to perform a kernel compile.
# Time to perform "Duplicate Image" in Gimp.
# Time to perform a heavy "Unsharp Mask" in Gimp.
# Time to start OpenOffice "from scratch".
# Time to reload OpenOffice.
# User experience to be assessed by all present on the day, using Galeon, Evolution, OpenOffice.

To make it easier to standardize for these tests we picked Gnome 2 as the Desktop Environment. This necessitated the use of the "Testing" flavour of Debian.
Hardware
The boxes from Evolution Xtreme had the following configuration:

Celeron 2 GHz Processor
256 MB DDR RAM
SAMSUNG - SP4002H 40G HD
MSI 6533E main board
All SIS chipset

lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS651 Host (rev02)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS 530 Virtual PCI-to-PCI bridge (AGP)
00:02.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 85C503/5513 (rev25)
00:02.5 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE]
00:02.7 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]
SiS7012 PCI Audio Accelerator (rev a0)
00:03.0 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS7001 USB Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.1 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS7001 USB Controller (rev 0f)
00:03.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS7002 USB 2.0
00:0f.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.
RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)

Installation
The 8139 NIC used the 8139too driver in all installations.

The Debian box was installed by Garry Buckle with aid from Matt Kemner. A standard Debian Testing setup was installed, but X was not persuaded to start with the stock SIS driver. As the stock kernel did not contain framebuffer support a new one (v2.4.21) was compiled to get video working. Upon testing with hdparm, it was apparent that this machine was having troubles setting above udma2. Eventually this problem was traced to the HD cable, a salutary lesson in the variability of identical hardware setups.

The Gentoo setup by Bill Kenworthy was compiled using the "stock" kernel source and the "-march=pentium3 -pipe -O3" compile flags. hdparm was needed to get dma on the ide running, despite it being in the kernel, but "xfree --configure" worked for Bill using the stock SIS driver. (Apparently the first time the command has worked for him!) The Gentoo ins

Non-questions

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware

Obvious, unless you use a genuine i386.

What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging?

Take a wild guess ...

That's a lot of useless preamble to put some meat around the bone of this Slashdot article, which essentially lies at the end, where it says "The article is here."

Re:Misses the point

[FeeDBaCK]

Portage has supported binary packages for a while now and the current beta version of portage even has support for automatically downloading binary packages.