Gentoo's Portage 3.0 Stabilized With Much Faster Dependency Calculations

[dweigert]

I could try to install Gentoo on my AMD 3970 box, It hasn't been spun up to do useful work quite yet. It is a bit of a beast, so it won't take me too long to do it

[smitty3268]

Not saying it is on you... But someone with a Gentoo install here with modern hardware should fire up your suite. Enthusiast community isn't about trying to represent the 99% - we are the 1% - occupy optimizations!

I know Gentoo is famous for the ricers, but in truth Gentoo is much more about maximum configurability and control more so than performance. I'd expect most Gentoo systems to be well behind Clear, and probably only a bit faster than the typical desktop distros.

[marios]

I know Gentoo is famous for the ricers, but in truth Gentoo is much more about maximum configurability and control more so than performance. I'd expect most Gentoo systems to be well behind Clear, and probably only a bit faster than the typical desktop distros.

It allows to control and customize the compiler flags, which allows more optimizations than most distros. Of course, if you blindly follow the guidelines, you will not have the fastest system possible and most people will stick to -O2 just because the wiki says so. If you enable more aggressive optimizations, you can be way faster than most distros and faster than Clear. You can even replicate Clear's CFLAGS.

[yoshi314]

Except Gentoo PMS specifies ebuild format and repository layout and package manager needs to adhere. Parsing is as much as I/O bound as it is CPU bound. I don't have profiling data at hand but I vaguely recollect mailing lists, the most time takes ebuild parsing which is a bash script essentially and libssh is used to avoid fork+exec (or there was patch for it for sure years ago). And filesystem related directory traversal cost. There is a reason why paludis (C++) is not faster than portage (or Brian's pkgcore) and it's not because it's inefficiently implemented.

this is exactly why exherbo decided to use their own package format, and mostly treated ebuild format support as a hack. and i would also prefer something that's faster to parse, even if it becomes a bigger pain to write an ebuild with it.

[deusexmachina]

You can even replicate Clear's CFLAGS.

Exactly, so the attitude of "just give up & stop trying to prove Gentoo can beat the others without loads of work" just doesn't make sense. Copy in a few config files, emerge, run the phoronix test suite - and we should be able to see just how much faster this proprietary promoting Clear Linux really is...

[smitty3268]

It allows to control and customize the compiler flags, which allows more optimizations than most distros. Of course, if you blindly follow the guidelines, you will not have the fastest system possible and most people will stick to -O2 just because the wiki says so. If you enable more aggressive optimizations, you can be way faster than most distros and faster than Clear. You can even replicate Clear's CFLAGS.

Obviously if you spend a bunch of time and effort you could reproduce everything Clear does and even exceed them in whatever way you cared to, but I don't think that's typical. You're talking about a lot of work. Throwing a couple generic CFLAGS like -O3 on everything isn't going to cut it.

I'd imagine that:

• using march=native probably doesn't provide much more benefit than just simply enabling sse4.2, or AVX.
• Clear at least compiles many key programs with specialized functions for different cpus anyway
• The number of total packages that are heavily involved in most performance gains are probably fairly small, and likely heavily patched/optimized by Clear. It might not be immediately obvious which ones these are to the average Gentoo user, though, so they may not realize which libs they really need to focus on optimizing and which ones are unimportant.
• Most people won't go any further than specifying a few CFLAGS - they aren't going to go to the effort of enabling PGO, for example, and if they do they may not have great workloads scripted out to make sure the training is done properly.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.

[Adarion]

Muhaha! I'm already so much faster! I use --nodeps .
SCNR.

Great to hear though, emerge -puvD world can take some time on systems with many packages.

[k1e0x]

There seem to be a lot of Gentoo fans here... Why haven't we seen a well optimized Gentoo install on some modern hardware using the Phoronix suite? It is always Clear Linux beating up some super stock distro

Gentoo mostly isn't about speed. (if you want stability).. it's about customizability and freedom of choice. However you can use the LTO patches for it that Clear Linux uses. https://github.com/InBetweenNames/gentooLTO

I've done it and they work, and they aren't bad.. but I tend to prefer a more stable system.