On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 07:10:55PM -0600, Big Mike Forsberg wrote:
> I have some free time and I'm looking into rebuilding my kernel with
> the non-comercial Intel optimized compiler.
I recommend against doing this, if only for reliability concerns (no one
seriously tests Linux/icc and there is little incentive to do so while
icc remains proprietary). It is not clear what benefit you hope to
realize, but icc's speed advantage becomes less pronounced the further
one moves away from code that looks like SPECmark. Even if you doubled
kernel performance, the effect on overall system performance would be
small unless you were doing something unusual such as using a complex
iptables ruleset while saturating a 10 Gb Ethernet link (constantly
context switching and servicing IO).
Playing compiler optimization games is not as straightforward as it
seems. A cautionary tale of optimization adventures was posted to
gentoo-user a month ago:
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2003/44/
Unless you are willing to fiddle with many permutations of flags, you
are better off using the packager's recommendations with -march and
-mcpu set to your CPU type (and usually -fomit-frame-pointer on x86-32).
On Tue, Dec 02, 2003 at 07:38:21PM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> The Linux kernel only compiles with GCC. It makes use of GCC C
> extensions that are not supported by the Intel compiler (or any other
> compiler for that matter).
My understanding is that icc has been able to compile Linux for some
time. Some GCC extensions were rolled into C99 and are thus standard C
(alas, not labels as values). icc supports these and others.
--
Andrew Gaul
http://gaul.org/
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