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Gentoo is Fast on New G5s
Durin_Deathless writes "According to a thread on the Gentoo/PPC forums, some Gentoo users have installed Gentoo on their new G5s without any problems whatsoever. Benchmarks are extraordinary: compiling kde on a G5 running at half speed takes 15 minutes, while it takes one hour on the fastest P4 available. Gentoo/PowerPC lead, Pieter Van den Abeele, reported that the machine currently runs at half speed due to fan controlling hardware not yet supported. The Gentoo team will post benchmarks, and will update installation instructions as soon as possible. There is some question as to what exactly was compiled, as the times seem impossibly fast even on the P4."
There was a followup post where the originator of the thread stated that he actually only compiled KDEBASE and KDELIBS...not the entire KDE setup. So no, unfortunately the G5s don't bring us 10x the performance just yet :)
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
Oh my, the poor site.. If this ever goes to the FP, it's doomed--
Testing the G5, part 1
Today at work we were surprised to find a brand new black box sitting at our feet, it was the new G5! First thing I did was rip open the tape, and open the beautiful card board box. Once I got it open I noticed there wasnt much special about the manuals, cables and cds. So I pulled out the huge machine (its alot bigger than I thought AND ALOT Heavier!!) And stuck it on my desk. I quickly hooked it all together, and plugged in the monitor. Before I opened it I took the side of the case off and noticed the clear window inside. Its very attractive but I feel its weird because it doesnt go all the way to the top of the case so the DVD-R and harddrives are not behind the window. So I booted it up with the side on and I couldnt believe how SILENT it was. I had to open it again to make sure the fans were moving. So I was playing with it even more and I noticed that if you take the window off the fans go to full RPM and are LOUD. When the window is on they look like they are going in slow motion, no wonder its quiet. So after I got though the registration wizard apple makes you do, I got to my Macosx Desktop. The first place I headed was system profiler. I dont remember what was there exactly but it showed a Sony DVD-R, 1.6 G5, two 128mb DDR 400 DIMMS in slot 1 and 2 and it was running Macosx 10.2.7. Nothing else was really that surprising. Since I had to do real work I couldnt really play with my new machine, so I have to wait until tomorrow to play with it. The first thing I am going to do is Burn a PPC Live CD and see if it runs, hopefully it does, To bad it has a Nvidia graphics card. So Ill report more to you tomorrow.
Talk to you later
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Compiling KDE in 15 minutes?
Did you emerge 'kde' or 'kdebase' or 'kdelibs' ? Does that 15 minute figure also include dependencies?
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I'm away for the weekend on a business trip.. but on Monday, I will post the benchmark tests and everything else for it.
KDE took about 3 hours to download and compiled in under 15 minutes... my Pentium 4 took roughly an hour to compile KDE...
I will run some tests on monday and run some kernel tests and such then post my results.
I used kernel 2.4.22 and kernel 2.6test4
both of which booted fine.. X only worked so far on 2.4.22
I've talked to benh (who gets his G5 from YDL in about a week) he told me that there is a remote possibility for the current kernel to work, but it wouldn't have SATA working and would run at half speed (due to the fans - 1ghz powerbooks had the same problem)
If compiling kde took only 15 minutes, how long is it going to take at full speed? 7 minutes?
Did you have to make a custom livecd to boot or did the current livecds work perfect?
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I will report back to you on monday with all the information with I get back home
BTW... I did not use the livecd to bootup
I will post an install guide monday
[edit]Forgot to add... for KDE.. I was just talking about the KDEBASE files and KDELIB files.. not all the other stuff like games, and media, etc[/edit]
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Colin Davis
KDE might be nice, but try compiling Mozilla with all options, email/irc/etc... Thats what I'd like to see as a benchmark test.
kdebase & kdelibs.
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You can't even download all the KDE packages in 15 minutes
If you would have read the thread, you would have known that it took him 3 hours to download kde.
This guy is a liar. Look through some of his posting history. He claimed to have downloaded America's Army source, compiled and run it on Linux/PPC.
...at least when running the spiffo graphics. (for some reason, the mac used *much* less cpu for that)
They were about neck-and-neck without the spiffo graphics, although the mac seemed slightly faster.
(Hard to tell, since they were different clockspeeds *and*
datasets.) Averages here...
This is on P2 and P3 chips. The Celerons were 3-5 times slower because it couldn't keep the data in cache.
Keep in mind that Seti@Home doesn't use Altivec or MMX.
--
"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
That problem at that point was that the people who where writting the code you ran under DOS we're stupid. The OS got out of your way. Other then the possibility of the filesystem was slower, DOS should have ran faster. Possibly only mildly faster, but faster.
Linux could multi-task, which means there is a scheduler. The scheduler is pure overhead in terms of speed. So now you are down to comparing apps to apps. Maybe a little bit of filesystem thrown in for giggles. I supposed DOS could have had a crappy timer interrupt or something, or crappy serial I/O interrupts. However, as I recall, most of the actual O/S of DOS was really in the BIOS, so blame the MoBo maker. The BIOS implemented all of the functionality to talk with hardware so DOS didn't have to write any real drivers.
As far as Linus not being a C programmer, go read his biographies and the early days of Linux. Go read interviews with his old roommate. He wasn't a C programmer. He originally started doing it in assembly. In fact the whole project was to learn more about the x86 assembly, it started as a terminal emulator.
He didn't know how sprintf worked. His roommate Lars implemented the original sprintf for the kernel for him.
Kirby
Let's analyze this article:
some Gentoo users have installed Gentoo on their new G5s without any problems whatsoever.
No. Only one entirely unreliable user made outrageous claims including running Gentoo. Not users but user.
while it takes one hour on the fastest P4 available.
The user said "my Pentium 4" without saying anything about what that Pentium 4 was. For all we know it could be an old 1.6Mhz with 128MB.
Pieter Van den Abeele, reported that the machine currently runs at half speed due to fan controlling hardware not yet supported.
He says that it may be possible to get the kernel working and if it did then it would run at half-speed. There is no "machine currently" running it to confirm this and it also proves that the other guy is lying.
The Gentoo team will post benchmarks, and will update installation instructions as soon as possible.
According to Abeele - "As far as I know, *none* of the Gentoo developers that are working on support for the G5." Now I guess that eventually they will benchmark and update installation instructions but it is obviously not on the radar screen right now.
The author of this article and pudge should be whipped for putting this awful article up.
That's why Windows 3.11 could run on it. It's why DOS Extenders ran on it. DOS didn't *DO* anything other then command.com really, and a little bit of filesystem stuff. Once you started running DOS you pretty much had complete control of the hardware. The BIOS did most of the heavy lifting on serial I/O, writing to the screen, reading or writing from the floppy or harddrive. That's why the BIOS had to be reversed engineered before you could make another PC run DOS. The BIOS did all the work. It's also why DOS ran a load more hardware then Linux did (at the time).
You go get a copy of DOS, go get a copy of an old Linux 0.2 kernel. Fire up program that calculates primes. Neither one of them is particularly faster or slower then the other, assuming you used similar compilers. Do that again with Windows, and you'll probably find that Windows runs about 2-5% slower (last time I checked), due to context switching speed and generic overhead of the (GUI updates, and other subsystems you don't have to have on a Linux machine).
Kirby