Peppercorn Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 Has anyone tried the process of recompiling source RPMs to specifically suit your computers hardware and processor?????? It's called "Mandrake a la Gentoo" and a pdf file of instructions can be found here, http://cybercfo.gkmweb.com/mandrake_a_la_gentoo-9.2.pdf I have used the idea now for the past 4 months or so when possible, instead of installing the RPM, I download the source RPM and reconfigure it to produce all the RPM's needed for my specific computer. I have had no problems with the actual process and my computer is very stable. I am only now in the process of completely reconfiguring XFree86, qt3, and Kde. Do any of you old timers or Xperts know if it is worth the extra effort or not?? For me, (a learning newbie) it's philosophy makes sense and so far it has worked really well. I for one, am interested in your opinions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Scrimpshire Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 Well, in my opinion, with a faster processor (1 GHz +), the difference is not noticable to me, so not worth the extra time...and with a slower processor, the time it takes to make the RPM is eternity, but may be worth it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 Yeah, I guess if there was a way of automating the process it would be worth it. But Mandrake is already fast in its own way. Now, if we had Portage for Mandrake... :P Here's what I wish: that Mandrake would urpmi itself up a point release. That's why I love Gentoo - install it once and it'll always be up to date. With Mandrake, you install 10 and then a few months later you have to install 10.1.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 I went through a phase of compiling every RPM on my system and compiling my own kernels. Its fun and a good learning experience, but i didn't notice any improvement in performance. Having said that, i think a lot depends on how old your computer is. If its relatively new.....there is little point. On older boxes? it could make a big difference with some apps. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 Yeah, I guess if there was a way of automating the process it would be worth it. But Mandrake is already fast in its own way. Now, if we had Portage for Mandrake... :P Here's what I wish: that Mandrake would urpmi itself up a point release. That's why I love Gentoo - install it once and it'll always be up to date. With Mandrake, you install 10 and then a few months later you have to install 10.1.... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Amen brother SoulSe! This is one pain in the .... <insert anatomical part here> ... I know the install itself is not a big deal and desktops etc. can be redone quickly but its the 'other' messing that kill me. Like you recompiled a kernel for a specific USB camera etc. etc. and things are just running nicely and... But ... on the otherside I think along the same lines as anon and Steve. Theres the catch-22 compile time... and the areas likely to benefit most are very high CPU that uses extended instruction sets. (i.e multimedia ) Mandrake make a very fast kernel anyway.... and it somewhat annoys me that using their .config if I recompile their kernel is still faster... but thats a different thread! So this really leaves codecs like lame and avifile, transcode etc. lets face it 90% odf things hardly benefit from running faster....in terms of CPU, even on a older PC. To address this where are the delays ? The delay on things like openoffice is due to its size, being read from disk and into memory etc. not non-optimised x86 instructions.... to a large extent it suffers portability speed problems like the mozilla suite that is due to making the code extremely portable it is less optimised for a specific architecture... optimising the kernel may help these but mainly we are talking IO ...but we are limited partially by memory and bus speed etc. optimising the disk or a faster disk will probably help more.... adding more memory... helps again .. Lots of stuff doesnt matter one bit..once a threshold is reached. For instance if a mail client takes 20ms or 30ms to open your mail is not noticable., Front ends like K3b or GRIP are just front ends.... optimising the code will do nothing except perhaps add instability. however the background LAME, LAVA codecs will benefit. This is one area I am interested in and I did want to run benchmarks on this sort of thing...(see workbench) determining what is worth recompiling and what is a waste of time.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Adriano Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 I remember a study mentioned in /. comparing Mandrake, Gentoo and maybe SuSE. This was a few months ago, perhaps in January. The results were surprising: they couldn't find much of a difference between a heavily optimized Gentoo machine and a Mandrake out-o-tha-box. I don't know if this has changed, but it certainly points out that, for the kind of power common nowadays, optimization doesn't do _too_ much. I'm sorry to be so vague. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 I remember the article ... However this is partly where my interest got renewed! I got to thinking that had they tested MM stuff it might have been different etc. and wondering where gains might be really made that are worth the effort and instability (possibilities) One thing I noticed was ripping MP3's on one K7 caused it to powerdown...becuase of power requirements (honest just a fraction of a second) I got to wondering if these parts of the chip are rarely used.,..since they need the code specialliy optimising...and what uses them most... i.e. would a K7 make a big difference over thge MMX in a P6 ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peppercorn Posted August 24, 2004 Author Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 So your opinions are mostly based around speed being the biggest benefit from this compilation, yet the speed difference is so minimal that it doesn't really matter. Right?? What about stability?? Does this exercise add stability or not?? Or is it really a waste of time and effort? AND as a virtual newbie to Mandrake (1 year now) I am annoyed that you always are having to download and upgrade again every two months or so. I think that this is a poor way of keeping up to date. I know very little about "portal" but maybe Mandrake needs to look into it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 I am annoyed that you always are having to download and upgrade again every two months or so. I think that this is a poor way of keeping up to date. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Unix/Linux has been around for decades, but putting it on the desktop is a relatively new and on going project. But you don't have to download and upgrade at all. (security updates being the exception) If your MDK 8.2 or whatever version is running fine, does what you require of it, then you possibly will never have to upgrade for years. Does this exercise add stability or not?? I doubt you would notice the difference. If i had an app that was constantly playing up, yet was considered a stable release, then i would try grabbing the source and compiling it hopefully to fix the problem. Other than that i wouldn't bother. IMHO Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 Not sure I agree on the first point anon... For one thing a perfectly good reason to upgrade is community support.... For many noobies not up to date they will not get the same responses here with 8.2 as 10.0 becuase noone will have 8.2 installed (and if they do like on a server they wont wanna play with it) Like quite a few members I upgrade MDK mainly to help others so I can answer questions better :D and quite a few members upgrade becuase that what we can help them with best! On the second.... I think it probably reduces stability. For the official (including community packages) mandrake compiles and the community tests the 586 version hence its the best tested. when yo start looking at deps and deps of deps then this is even more pronounced. i.e. say you have a later version of LAME that isnt backwards compatible with a part of GRIP... (to quote a real life question).... In 90% of cases an official MDK RPM will be tested far more thoroughly than different options of a source RPM... Of course if you wanna get dirty and modify the source you might clean it up etc. but even compiling your own kernel can reduce stability.... I had this with the nforce stuff. It worked perfectly with the stock vanilla MDK in 9.2 but stock vanilla only addresses 868MB (or so) or memory... It refused to work with the -enterprise version (from RPM) and compiling my own kernel with 4GB support was always unstable. When you think about it Id bepretty stupid to think Id do a better job than Mandrake on their stock kernel (in terms of stability across different machines) but I might do abetter job than one of their more esoteric kernels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 Not sure I agree on the first point anon... For one thing a perfectly good reason to upgrade is community support.... Like quite a few members I upgrade MDK mainly to help others so I can answer questions better :D Thats very admirable of you. :o Me, i up grade purely for selfish reasons. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
papaschtroumpf Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 Not sure I agree on the first point anon... For one thing a perfectly good reason to upgrade is community support.... Like quite a few members I upgrade MDK mainly to help others so I can answer questions better :D Thats very admirable of you. :o Me, i up grade purely for selfish reasons. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Mdk is already optimized for Pentium and above processors, so even out of the box it's more efficient than stuff designed to run any any old i386. I used to recompile some stuff when I was running Red Hat on a K6 400MHz by making sure the compiler option were ideal for the K6 architectur It took forever to compile but the speed gain was noticeable (especially in KDE) although once in a while a package would crash, probably because the code was poorly written and made assumptions that the optimizations broke. Now running mdk on an AMD 2700+, I don't think the speed gain is worth my time to optimize, and I still feel that there is a slightly higher risk of instability. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 (edited) Yeah, I guess if there was a way of automating the process it would be worth it. But Mandrake is already fast in its own way. Now, if we had Portage for Mandrake... :P Here's what I wish: that Mandrake would urpmi itself up a point release. That's why I love Gentoo - install it once and it'll always be up to date. With Mandrake, you install 10 and then a few months later you have to install 10.1.... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It does. Same with debs apt. they both can do what portage can do. The diff is the commands are spread out between several functions of the app so you really just have to know the right combo of a command to give. Urpmi can download source....rpm-build rebuilds......rpmbuilder compiles a group and urpmi can be told to download only, just like apt....bla bla bla bla....what do you think portage is? One that does all...... && ;) compiling everything made no diff on my 600 Celeron. Probably just put it in its grave a little sooner ;) Edited August 24, 2004 by bvc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest anon Posted August 24, 2004 Report Share Posted August 24, 2004 compiling everything made no diff on my 600 Celeron. Probably just put it in its grave a little sooner ;) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> :sad: :sad: :sad: But look at the fun you had :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted August 25, 2004 Report Share Posted August 25, 2004 Yeah, I guess if there was a way of automating the process it would be worth it. But Mandrake is already fast in its own way. Now, if we had Portage for Mandrake... :P Here's what I wish: that Mandrake would urpmi itself up a point release. That's why I love Gentoo - install it once and it'll always be up to date. With Mandrake, you install 10 and then a few months later you have to install 10.1.... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It does. Same with debs apt. they both can do what portage can do. The diff is the commands are spread out between several functions of the app so you really just have to know the right combo of a command to give. Urpmi can download source....rpm-build rebuilds......rpmbuilder compiles a group and urpmi can be told to download only, just like apt....bla bla bla bla....what do you think portage is? One that does all...... && ;) compiling everything made no diff on my 600 Celeron. Probably just put it in its grave a little sooner ;) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Right. So would you mind giving me the urpmi command I can use to go from Mandrake 10 -> Mandrake 10.1 ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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