On 9/7/06, Anselm R. Garbe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
No, because CFLAGS might inherit totally retarded options from the host OS with your patch. Also, the -OXXX -march=XXXX options don't bring any real benefit. You shouldn't believe the FUD the gentoo people want to make you believe. The gcc optimizations are kind of a joke compared to other commercial C compilers. -Os is optimizing for size and the architecture is implicitely given by the compiler. If your userland is already builded for the athlon-xp architecture and your compiler toolchain is linked as well to athlon-xp architecture, you don't need to set any options in gcc. Just compare the binaries with -O3 and -O3 -march=athlon-xp, I doubt you will see much or any difference in your environment. Apart from that, I doubt you will be able to measure any difference in resource usage, cpu execution time, and what not.
Optimization is far overrated, and not really an argument for using a source based distro. Basically, any machine that's fast enough to run a source based package system conveniently doesn't noticably benefit from optimizations, and any system where the optimizations would be really noticable is so slow that running a source based package system on it is a complete PITA. The main justification for source based package systems is, in my eyes, something quite different than speed: platform independence. The more platforms an OS runs on, the harder it gets to provide binary packages for each and every one of them. Source based package systems are a good solution there (NetBSD for instance provides binary packages for the most common platforms it runs on, and relies on pkgsrc for other platforms). Gr. Sander.
