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Gentoo Ricer Comparison
Dozix007 writes "The folks over at Funroll-Loops have created a funny comparison between the Ricer fad gripping the US, and Gentoo Linux. In a quote from the site 'Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball bats...'"
...I am a Gentoo user and fan.
/etc/inittab file.
Gentoo is not necessarily good because of the product, but in large part because of the process. When you finish doing a stage whatever (especially 1) install, you end up learning an awful lot about Linux that someone that drops in a SuSe/RedHat/Fedora Core/whatever disk doesn't know. Most experienced Linux users will see that a user that understands whats going on under the hood will fare better than one who gives you a thousand yard stare when you mention the
I think the benefits of compiling from source on everything are varied at best, and only sometimes outweighed by the time necessary to do it. That said, in some cases it is a good thing - if used correctly, the USE flags are nifty and let you compile without support for features you don't need. This can be quite useful, and provide a modest speed up in some cases.
Ricers aside, Gentoo provides a superb package management system in the spirit of apt/yum, and is also source based. It boosts users with moderate knowledge level to a better understanding of the architecture of a Linux system, and this can lead to some absurd enthusiasm about the distro for the younger/more impressioanable types, but I take it much the same way I take any fanboy mentality: you'll see the upsides and the downsides as time goes on. I happen to think Gentoo is great on the whole, so I use it.
Its just as childish for the folks annoyed by the Gentoo zealots to turn around be be anti-Gentoo zealots, creating webpages and ranting on about how horrible a community it is. Stop by the forums and you'll see its a responsive, well informed group, the majority of whom are quite reasonable.
White americans have been modding American cars since the days of Henry Ford but we don't call them "potatoers" or whatever the staple white american food is.
According to american culture, at least, those whiteys would be referred to as "greasemonkeys", "gearheads", "rodders", etc. And, again according to American culture, it's becoming known as "pimping out" the car. Which is of course, very politically correct itself. Selling women as a commondity == improving a car.
Hey, did you know that in the vast majority of northern China, people don't eat rice?
Hey, did you know that the vast majority of Asian cars aren't from China? What the hell does that really have to do with anything? Do you even know where the motorsport slang term "rice" comes from?
Of course, they're all gooks and chinks to us, eh?
From the way you're flaming on, I am guessing you don't.
It came from some performance bike racers in Japan mixing their standard fuel with alcohol to help boost power in the small engines at high RPM. Some of them used alcohol distilled from rice wine, and thus caught the nickname of "rice burners". Because that's literally what they were doing. This was way more common 15 -20 years ago, these days it's fallen out of vogue as modern racing fuel mixtures either have methanol in them already, or are formulated to not need it.
Man I love ignorance.
To each their own. You certainly do seem to indulge in it, so...
Gentoo Sparc is the only sparc distro that is up2date on the sparc cpu/platform. SuSE/Redhat dropped support. :(
So if you want Linux on your Sparc machine, Gentoo has the most up2date desktop and packages.
If so... time it.
I've gone to great lengths and benchmarks to establish whether or not gcc per-processor optimizations are actually as good as ricers (you) say they are, and concluded that the difference is so small only a select few synthetic benches will really benefit. The biggest and only consistent improvement to performance is use of -O1 instead of -O0. Everything else is such a small difference that it's hardly worth reading the manpage for, let alone typing in every time you set up a box.
Here, example of a code and Makefile I wrote to test gcc's optimization, results:
dave@thor inst $ make
-O: 612 cycles
-O2: 615 cycles
-O3: 609 cycles
-O3 -march=pentium4 -mfpmath=sse -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math: 626 cycles
(Cycles is how many times it repeated a certain function in a fine-grained time frame) There you are. -O3 is slower than -O2, -O2 is only very very slightly faster than -O (and if you re-run, half the time it will be slower), and a "k-l33t cFlaGz omghax" is only a notch faster than those. This is one of the sources I developed which benefits the [b]most[/b] from this tweaking! In a real-world application it makes so little difference it's not worth recompiling anyway. "hella faster" my ass. You're better off overclocking or something.
Gentoo Is Rice. You are a ricer. You got owned by someone who bothers measuring things. HAND.
(Besides, USE is the real advantage of Gentoo, the sooner you take that more seriously the better your life will be)
Sam ty sig.
Yes, read the explanation, 'cycles' as in how many times the function was repeated. Not as in CPU cycles.
And I have tried this on many codes, big and small, real-world and synthetic, mine and popular. I don't know what 'big boost' you're talking about - you realise -O3 only adds two relatively minor flags over -O2, right? Read the manpage, and failing that, the source. I have.
And where are your figures?
Sam ty sig.
In a real-world application it makes so little difference it's not worth recompiling anyway.
I am not a developer with my own optimization test code. I am a user with an extraordinary real-life requirement to perform a certain application as fast as I possibly can. It has been my job to come up with performance alternatives over the past few months, and I have professionally evaluated Windows, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Gentoo in a lab environment with code that actually does something. I have measured output performance to the millisecond and have more raw analysis data than I can back up to a DVD at the moment.
Gentoo (with -O3 and march=pentium4) significantly outperforms everything else. During run-to-failure testing, Gentoo held up 30% longer than Mandrake or Red Hat, and Windows never really showed up for the race.
The difference between -O1 and -O3 may certainly be rice (but I was able to determine that by reading the gcc docs), but Gentoo itself most certainly is not.