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Open Source OS Benchmarking Competition
BenchmarkingFreak writes "OSnews is running a story about a new benchmarking competition: OSU Open Source Lab wanted to take the concept of benchmarking a little bit further with the Beaver Challenge 2004. In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance. And they are running it all on wicked machines, just imagine... well you know."
* Debian GNU/Linux
* Fedora Linux
* FreeBSD
* Gentoo Linux
* NetBSD
* OpenBSD
* Red Hat Linux
* Slackware Linux
* SuSE GNU/Linux
Where's Mandrake?
Given OSNews' recent penchant for poorly-done benchmarks (e.g. 1, 2), I'm glad to see them run an article about someone else's (hopefully well-done) testing. By having expert teams who know what they're doing tweak the configurations, this should be a much more representative result. Hopefully OSNews will learn some methodology from these guys...
"You can never have too many elephants on your team."
Beautiful.
Back a while, when gentoo was still had the smell of pop novelty, you would hear all this great stuff about how gentoo distros were the fastest, something about being able to specify --funroll-all-the-bad-loopies and --enable-r0xor-opts and --omit-random-instructions to the compiler. Of course, all these claims of gentoo's speed have never been backed up. On the contrary, the only results we've seen published tend to indicate that you average gentoo distro is composed of slower-than-average or average applications.
These days, we hear the new mantras of the gentoo-fanboys: it's not the speed (good thing!) that they use gentoo for, but instead the ease of use or robust package management or configuration flexibility. That's great and all, but it's all a bunch of green-is-my-favorite-color kind of advocacy: opinionated, unsupported, and unconvincing. People who've gone through the long laborious pain of installing gentoo (reminiscent of slackware 3.0 and libc upgrades, what year is it again?), and then having wasted the effort on a system that will probably spend more cycles compiling itself than serving the users, they justify the waste with a belief that their system is better managed or more finely tuned or whatever. Emphasis on whatever.
Of course, none of the supposed benefits of gentoo are backed with anything approaching rigorous analysis. Instead we get vague anecdotes and slashdot fanboyism. When we inevitably learn that the gentoo portage system is riddled with problems, conflicting package maintenance mechanisms and policy, broken and overtweaked package scripts, and that the whole thing needs a certain amount of voodoo to work, the gentoo boys will probably come up with some other reason why it is the one distro to rule them all.
The rest of will just wait for the results of your empirical studies with smiles on our faces!
XML causes global warming.
"When we inevitably learn that the gentoo portage system is riddled with problems, conflicting package maintenance mechanisms and policy, broken and overtweaked package scripts, and that the whole thing needs a certain amount of voodoo to work"
You know this is one of the better descriptions of portage/Gentoo I have heard. If I had the time/resources I would re-write portage using a bette langauge and more sane feature set. Portage was a good idea, and is a HORRIBLE implementation. however it still beats RPM.
PS somebody mod the parent up, I would have modded you up, but I already posted to this topic.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Advice: Read the HUNDREDS of posts on the gentoo forums about this.
The fact of the matter is that portage is plenty fast. Any speed boosts given to the actual emerge program set would be negligable because of the sheer amount of time dedicated to compiling.
More Advice: Stop trolling.
When you say that "Portage was a good idea, and is a HORRIBLE implementation" you really need to enumerate WHY it's a horrible implementation.
Take this common troll as an example.
Example 1: Windows is a HORRIBLE OS.
Example 2: Windows is a HORRIBLE OS because being locked into the choices Microsoft made in my "interests" are usually counter-productive.
See the difference? Example 1, while in many people's oppinion is valid, leaves people wondering why Windows is horrible. Example 2 gives anybody reading specific evidence and also allows anybody that wants to defend the point areas to do so.
I love the way that gentoo handles packages. I, admitingly, have a BSD bias, but it still allows my system to be what I want.
The feature set is anything but 'insane,' but once again, I have no idea why you think so, so I can't exactly defend that against any reasons you have.
Reply to this post and we might actually have some decent points to give to the gentoo team to make inprovements.
Not Free(as in beer). Free(as in "I'm free to beat you over the head for being a dumbass")
1. Unless you're using a computer more than 10 years old, you're not going to be waiting for Portage to calculate dependancies for any significant amount of time. I wouldn't mind Gentoo developers optimizing Portage for speed, but only trolls or the most anal-retentive of users will be put off by it's "inefficiency".
/usr/portage; /var/tmp/portage
2. RTFM. Gentoo docs are very easy to follow, and it only needs to be done once. I'm sure that typing in a command or two is not going to kill you.
3. Emerge, as far as the end user is concerned, is the Gentoo package manager. The scripts that power Portage are completely behind the scenes. I've been using Gentoo since it was an early beta, and I've never had to go in and modify a Portage script in order to get it to work.
4.
Yep. Really disorganized.
5. Several options:
a.) tell portage to ignore the dependancy and install anyway
b.) remove java functionality from db
c.) install db manually and inject the package into portage
6. Gentoo is a source-based distro. It doesn't have very many binary packages, nor does it claim to. If binaries are so important to you, Gentoo offers a physical product that you can buy with all major packages precompiled for all major CPU architectures.
7. I'll give you this one.