Would Phoronix do Gentoo Linux versus Ubuntu Linux benchmarks?

[HokTar]

Thank you guys for the feedback.

Shining Arcanine: I have to admit that the softwares I run are proprietary ones. You know that writing FEA and CFD codes are rather complicated. (Though I have to mention that the capabilities of OpenFOAM are remarkable.)
I even feel fortunate because there are linux versions for these (e.g.: ANSYS) unlike CAD applications (there are no more PRO/E or CATIA support for *nix).

Point is that I want to use my system without bothering much with upgrades, dependencies, etc. So Ubuntu is good for me because generally it is stable, gives me more freedom than a certain other OS and most importantly causes less pain.

The problem for/with the above mentioned programs is the lack of list of dependencies. Even if they say that Ubuntu is supported I often end up manually installing a few libraries. There should be a standard set of libraries which are included in every flavour of distros.

[BlackStar]

I did read that article. The consensus at the Gentoo forums was that the benchmark results were flawed:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-817950.html

Yeah, all four posters conceded that the benchmark was flawed.

[disi]

So, I just tested a few things
While messing around I had a strange thing. Here are results of i7 Ubuntu vs phenom Gentoo and all the compilation is not displayed for my phenom:

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=disi-28772-18029-25142

It definately did something, but came up with average time 0 seconds all the time... what did I do wrong?

Here is a compilebench test, which worked fine:

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=disi-14015-26573-4799

[Shining Arcanine]

Thank you guys for the feedback.

Shining Arcanine: I have to admit that the softwares I run are proprietary ones. You know that writing FEA and CFD codes are rather complicated. (Though I have to mention that the capabilities of OpenFOAM are remarkable.)
I even feel fortunate because there are linux versions for these (e.g.: ANSYS) unlike CAD applications (there are no more PRO/E or CATIA support for *nix).

Point is that I want to use my system without bothering much with upgrades, dependencies, etc. So Ubuntu is good for me because generally it is stable, gives me more freedom than a certain other OS and most importantly causes less pain.

The problem for/with the above mentioned programs is the lack of list of dependencies. Even if they say that Ubuntu is supported I often end up manually installing a few libraries. There should be a standard set of libraries which are included in every flavour of distros.

Gentoo does dependency resolution for you, so you really do not have to bother with it. The software you manually install is probably available on Gentoo. You will just need to tell Gentoo to install it with "emerge <package-name-here>" and it will automate fetching the package, compiling it and installing it.

The only behind the scenes thing with which you will need to concern yourself is Gentoo's masking system. Gentoo has three levels of packages, stable, testing (softmasked) and masked (hardmasked). Stable software is what is installed by default and Gentoo always installs the latest version of this unless you tell it to do otherwise. Testing software is considered stable by upstream, but it has not yet been cleared by Gentoo's package maintainers as being stable. Most Gentoo users instruct Gentoo to use this software by default without issues, myself included.

If you find that some of the packages Gentoo provides are out of date and you need to start unsoftmasking stuff, dependency resolution tends to break, which requires that you unmask successively greater numbers of packages to get things to work. This never damages your system because the package manager will not go ahead with upgrades/software installations unless all dependencies have been fulfilled, but this situation can be avoided by running as ~arch as Gentoo users call it. This requires that you add ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" to your /etc/make.conf file, assuming x86 is your architecture (~amd64 is used if you run x86_64) and install the latest updates for your system. Since this will upgrade some low level stuff, you will need to follow Gentoo's OpenRC migration guide if you do this to make sure everything works correctly. After doing this, dependency resolution should always be done correctly by Gentoo's package manager and you will not have to concern yourself with whether or not some dependency is in the stable tree or the testing tree.

Lastly, the masked packages are packages that either are known to have something wrong with them or are beta releases from the upstream developers. These you usually never need, but some Gentoo users use them. In the case of my laptop, I am using the latest masked versions of the nvidia-drivers, chromium and opera packages, which are masked because they are considered betas by upstream, but all of them are known for being release quality software, despite being considered beta software by upstream. I have my own reasons for needing things to be this bleeding edge in these 3 cases.

Once you explicitly install a package via Gentoo's package manager (as opposed to an implicit installation where something is installed because something you specified either directly or indirectly depends on it), it is recorded in Gentoo's /var/lib/portage/world file, so any time you have Gentoo check for updates for your system, Gentoo will check for updates for these packages for you, which I find makes things very convenient. If you do not want certain software to be updated beyond a specific version, you can tell Gentoo that in /etc/portage/package.mask by specifying either the package and its version or a range of versions (using >= or <= as a prefix) and Gentoo's package manager will obey that.

[loonyphoenix]

I would love to see a rolling distro shootout Gentoo vs. Arch vs. Debian Sid But somehow I doubt a benchmark like that will ever be done on Phoronix...

[Shining Arcanine]

So, I just tested a few things
While messing around I had a strange thing. Here are results of i7 Ubuntu vs phenom Gentoo and all the compilation is not displayed for my phenom:

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=disi-28772-18029-25142

It definately did something, but came up with average time 0 seconds all the time... what did I do wrong?

Here is a compilebench test, which worked fine:
http://global.phoronix-test-suite.co...015-26573-4799

That is not exactly a fair comparison because the hardware of the Ubuntu system and Gentoo system vary remarkably, however, it is is impressive that the Gentoo system was able to outperform the Ubuntu system in OpenSSL, despite being remarkably outgunned as far as raw hardware goes.

[disi]

And in GraphicsMagick 1.3.7 HWB Color Space, whatever that is... this was just a test anyway. I am looking into this compileproblem...

[duby229]

Hey guys, I think Michael found an article already that does pretty much exactly what your looking for. I found it in on a post that Michael made about other publishers that have used PTS.

Heres a link check it out.

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574/3/

[duby229]

sorry heres a better link...

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574/1/

[disi]

This is a very popular link. In my Opinion, Gentoo is not only about CFLAGS, it's more about USE flags. If I install every peace of Software the way it is installed on an Ubuntu system and just change the optimization flag...

I found a similar system I have and in v2.2.0 compiling is working for me The apache compile seems buggy :/

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/index.php?k=profile&u=disi-22377-14108-20945