Re: Building optimized packages, including kernel
On Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 02:13:22PM +0100, Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
> Ross Boylan <RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org> writes:
>
> > What is the debian way to do this when I'm building packages from
> > source?
>
> Take a look at pentium-builder.
Thanks.
>
> > And, using kernel-package, how do I build kernels and modules
> > appropriately?
>
> Well, "as usual". What problems do you have in mind?
As I said, I want to turn on optimization for my machine.
I had forgotten the kernel has an option for selecting the processor
type, so I set Athlon/Duron. This had a couple of
oddities/limitations:
1) despite this choice, the compiler lines were
-march=i686
rather than athlon. I wonder why.
2) optimization was "only" -O2
3) I wasn't sure if this would affect the modules build, but that
seems to have used the same options.
The other problem was whether I should use some variant name to
reflect the architecture. I decided not to (consistent with your
advice below), though I did use make-kpkg --append-to-version because
of other changes (patches) I applied.
>
> > Should I build packages that have subarchitecture names?
>
> You mean like "gzip-athlon"? This is not too useful, as other packages
> will depend on them by their official names.
>
> > By the way, I believe it is safe to mix code I've optimized with regular
> > unoptimized libraries (i.e., regular debs).
>
> Yes.
>
> > I also understand that I can't mix code from different versions of
> > gcc, at least not C++ from 3.2. So I should stick with 2.95 unless I
> > want to rebuild every package I use--correct?
>
> Yes, the C++ ABI fluctuated between 2.95 and 3.2. AFAIK there are no
> similar problems with C. So going to 3.2 means rebuilding all C++
> libraries that you need first.
>
My impression is it was a moving target, so different versions are not
compatible: 2.92 <> 3.1 <> 3.2 for example. Is that right, or is it
just a break at 3.2?
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