Gentoo is Fast on New G5s

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Posted by pudge on Tuesday September 9, 2003 @04:18PM from the supa-fast dept.

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."

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compiling KDE by platipusrc · 2003-09-09 16:28 · Score: 5, Informative

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 :)

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I can't wait to see by iendedi · 2003-09-09 16:33 · Score: 4, Interesting

How this thing runs Linux once it has been optimized for it (correct drivers, kernel patches, compiler switches, compiler version, etc..)

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How teh fuck? by bic2k · 2003-09-09 16:35 · Score: 5, Insightful

Do the editors of slashdot even read what they link to? The forum thread was the most useless thread I've ever read. Nothing is proven. Nothing is confirmed. And some guy is claiming he installed suse 64bit for AMD on a G5... tell me there is something more interesting out there!!!

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--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
1. Re:How teh fuck? by Fizzlewhiff · 2003-09-09 18:30 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I installed 64 bit HP/UX on my Pentium 4. It only took me one HP/UX CD and a dab of epoxy but it installed nicely on the computer. I am sure someone could do the same with a G5 and a 64bit AMD distro, although a Mac person would probably do a much nicer job since they are more artistic. They'd probably frame and mat it in a nice shadow box with some pretty flowers or colored macaronis.
  
  --
  
  'Same speed C but faster'
Linking to a Forum? by E1ven · 2003-09-09 16:37 · Score: 4, Informative

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

Back to top

Compiling KDE in 15 minutes?

Did you emerge 'kde' or 'kdebase' or 'kdelibs' ? Does that 15 minute figure also include dependencies?
_________________

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
compile time? by sdibb · 2003-09-09 16:38 · Score: 5, Interesting

There is some question as to what exactly was compiled, as the times seem impossibly fast even on the P4.

No kidding... my Athlon XP 2500 took about 15 hours to compile KDE. You can't even download all the KDE packages in 15 minutes.

Besides, the actual "kde" ebuild is nothing more than a little flag that says yes indeed, I installed all the other KDE packages: kdebase, kdenetwork, kdemultimedia, kdeaddons, kdeedu, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdeadmin, kdeutils, kdeartwork and kdepim.

Fortunately, you don't need to install each one if you want to use KDE's basic functions.
1. Re:compile time? by Arielholic · 2003-09-09 22:59 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  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.
Hopefully, Apple will help by ZackSchil · 2003-09-09 16:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

I think Apple likes it very much when someone buys their hardware and runs Linux on it. The large margins on their boxen help cover OS X R&D (which is more expensive than you could possibly fathom, a full modern OS in 4 years, wait, what?!). They even have a reseller that is allowed to sell Macs pre-installed with Linux, unlike MS, who threaten any Wintel PC makers who try to offer Linux on their boxes with expensive licensing.

Plus, Mac OS X plays very nicely with Linux boxes and they know it. I just hope Apple will help the small Linux on Mac community integrate their software and proprietary hardware for at least full functionality. I have a feeling they will.
1. Re:Hopefully, Apple will help by ComputerSlicer23 · 2003-09-09 18:08 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Uhhh, there's a lot more then 4 years into Mac OS X. I was reading Mac OS X runtime docs 4 years ago (they we're the best docs for OpenStep runtime I was using at a job, I quit 3.5 years ago, and I worked there 1.5 years, so I am pretty sure it's got at least 5 years in it at Apple that they've had public documentation). They have a lot of pre-existing software from FreeBSD, and Mach. They also have all of the code and coders that cames from NeXT. It's still no small feat by Apple, but how long was BeOS around? They had pretty good stuff from what I hear, and I'm not sure how long they have been around. QNX 4 was put together pretty quickly. It was a complete re-write of QNX. So was Neutrino.
  Second, Linux could have been written in a lot less time if it had been designed from the beginning to end up what it is (it might not be as good, but it could have been pretty good a lot sooner then it was). The concept that SMP existed. Having somebody who knew what the hell they we're doing at the beginning of it. Linus is a damned genious now, but when he started it, he wasn't a C programmer at all. Which leads me to guess, he wasn't much of a UNIX programmer at the time (let alone an experienced kernel programmer). It wasn't like he designed around the concept of having SMP, or even optimized disk accesses. Scalability wasn't a big deal. Running with more then 8MB of RAM was impossible (he only had 8, so if you had more and wanted to use it, you had to fix it yourself). Second, it's a whole heck of a lot easier to write an OS when the platform is relatively fixed (yeah it needs to work under x86, but if it doesn't, that's not Apple's problem).
  Kirby
2. Re:Hopefully, Apple will help by ZackSchil · 2003-09-10 05:14 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I was more contrasting Apple's development of Mac OS X to that of Windows XP. When Apple took NeXt Step, it was about as far as Windows NT 3 in terms of usability on a modern consumer desktop. Then they banged out an NT 4 equivalent in the public beta back in 1999. They pulled off 10.0 to 10.1 around 2001 to meet Windows 2000. Then came Jaguar in 2002 to meet Windows XP. They kept up with Microsoft and were, in fact, blasting by them. Longhorn has been delayed to 2005. Mac OS X 10.3 comes out late this year! Apple is blasting through with Mac OS X in hyper-development. It's costing a lot put the point is, they have nowhere near the type of resources Microsoft has! Not even close! But they're dong it and Apple fans like myself are footing the bill (quite literally, I'm happy to do it, $120 a year is cool for this speed of OS progression, though others think not)
3. Re:Hopefully, Apple will help by ComputerSlicer23 · 2003-09-10 13:42 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Uhhh, you better hope an NeXT head never, ever reads that... They make Apple geeks seem like fair weather faithful. :-)
  I was not much of a NeXT user (only used it a handful of times). However, their development kit, especially their AppBuilder stuff was incredible (I used that on other platforms). I've heard about the feature set the OS had in 1991 was pretty impressive. I used to work in a room full of people who talked about the wonders that NeXT was at the time. NeXT was an incredible OS from everyone I've heard from (I know at least 3 independent sources of people I trust who say that). It's largest two failings, were interrelated. It was too expensive, and nobody made third party applications for it. It was right there with Amiga and OS/2 in terms of wonderful OS that nobody used.
4. Re:Hopefully, Apple will help by ComputerSlicer23 · 2003-09-11 07:39 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Uhhh, do you know anything about the guts of DOS? DOS really doesn't do anything. DOS isn't an OS in the technical sense. It's a boot loader, and let's you provide access to BIOS routines. It wasn't DOS that was slow. It was the BIOS routines.
  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
Well duh, 5>4 by ArmorFiend · 2003-09-09 16:49 · Score: 5, Funny

G5 is lots faster than P4? This is so obvious to even the most clueless home computer user! I mean, come on, how can a P4 possibly compete with a G5? The G5 is clearly 1 ahead!

Can slashdot please tell us something that's not common knowledge? I mean geez, next the'll be like: Saddam Masterminded 9/11. Well no duh!
The above post, condensed to 5 words by AvantLegion · 2003-09-09 17:09 · Score: 3, Funny

"This one goes to 5!"
in other news: by croddy · 2003-09-09 17:09 · Score: 3, Funny

a gentoo user is claiming incomprehensible performance boosts due to foo! film at eleven!
What he compiled... by Lally+Singh · 2003-09-09 17:25 · Score: 3, Informative

kdebase & kdelibs.

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Processor performance has never been my limit by MerlynEmrys67 · 2003-09-09 19:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

Long time ago... I learned that the hard disk speed is the most important factor in compile speeds. Once you have LOTS of memory, then get the fastest SCSI hard drive you can get your hands on... forget 7200 RPM IDE drives, think 15K RPM SCSI disks. Every time you have to open a new file for compiling... you have to spin (on average) 1/2 of the disk to get your head positioned... it makes a huge difference

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I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Wow... informative headline by cubal · 2003-09-09 22:14 · Score: 4, Funny

I mean, is that or is that not the vaguest bloody headline you've ever read?

"Linux is fast on a new fast computer"

I mean, come on...
1. Re:Wow... informative headline by nacturation · 2003-09-09 23:05 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  I mean, is that or is that not the vaguest bloody headline you've ever read?
  
  "Linux is fast on a new fast computer"
  
  I mean, come on...
  
  I guess my submission was rejected... "Gentoo is slow on an old G3"
  
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About twice as fast. by jhesse · 2003-09-10 02:34 · Score: 4, Informative

...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.

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"I have also mastered pomposity, even if I do say so myself." -Kryten
Re:The real test. by commodoresloat · 2003-09-10 06:06 · Score: 5, Funny

Actually, the real test will come when somebody measures how fast this thing can copy a 17 megabyte file from one folder to another.
Worst Slashdot Article Ever by Anonymous Coward · 2003-09-10 07:01 · Score: 5, Informative

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.