> v> Also, it would be nice if we could have the packages compiled > v> with better optimization with gcc than just -O2. At least, > v> cluster specific stuff. A better idea would be to use > v> pentium-builder and rebuild from source on a particular > v> architecture.. Ideas ? > > Check with debian-devel. I vaguely remember sensible arguments > against it, more along the lines of -- > "do the source-level compile yourself with the optimize flags" > > WITH decent arguments for it. Can't recall them off the top of my > head, though... Guess I was too sleepy to make my point clear. What I meant was that there should be an easy way to fetch the sources on a machine, and compile and install the debs produced, all in one shot. One of the reasons for not doing so was that there are just too many permutations of intel and amd architectures to build architecture specific packages. Right now, one has to # apt-get source <package> # dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot # dpkg -i <package> Now consider this : With pentium-builder installed, you would say # export DEBIAN_BUILDARCH="-march=pentiumpro" Then a wrapper script would do all the above mentioned things, say # make-debian-beowulf which would get the sources of all packages in task-parallel-computing-* and build and install them. I believe this would be very helpful with packages such as atlas. Also, these packages would have to be tagged somehow so that apt-get upgrade doesn't replace them with packages from the archives. All this would be very helpful now that GCC supports machine dependent optimizations for athlons and other newer intel and amd cpus. On a separate issue, did anyone read the slashdot article about seti@home workunit times ? I believe that the Windows2000 consistently outperformed linux because of a better compiler. I also read that GCC 3 is going to have a new backend for code generation for the x86, which will allow it to do aggressive optimization. So, far the gcc 3 debs that I try (which are built from cvs) are disappointing when I just plug it to use some of my code. Then again, they're development builds. Can anyone comment on these issues ? viral -- I'll see you on the Dark Side of the Moon.
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