Gentoo is Fast on New G5s 119
Durin_Deathless writes "According to a thread on the Gentoo/PPC forums, some Gentoo users have installed Gentoo on their new G5s without any problems whatsoever. Benchmarks are extraordinary: compiling kde on a G5 running at half speed takes 15 minutes, while it takes one hour on the fastest P4 available. Gentoo/PowerPC lead, Pieter Van den Abeele, reported that the machine currently runs at half speed due to fan controlling hardware not yet supported. The Gentoo team will post benchmarks, and will update installation instructions as soon as possible. There is some question as to what exactly was compiled, as the times seem impossibly fast even on the P4."
compiling KDE (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
The real test. (Score:3, Informative)
What he compiled... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:compile time? (Score:4, Informative)
If you would have read the thread, you would have known that it took him 3 hours to download kde.
Bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
About twice as fast. (Score:4, Informative)
They were about neck-and-neck without the spiffo graphics, although the mac seemed slightly faster.
(Hard to tell, since they were different clockspeeds *and*
datasets.) Averages here...
This is on P2 and P3 chips. The Celerons were 3-5 times slower because it couldn't keep the data in cache.
Keep in mind that Seti@Home doesn't use Altivec or MMX.
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:3, Informative)
That problem at that point was that the people who where writting the code you ran under DOS we're stupid. The OS got out of your way. Other then the possibility of the filesystem was slower, DOS should have ran faster. Possibly only mildly faster, but faster.
Linux could multi-task, which means there is a scheduler. The scheduler is pure overhead in terms of speed. So now you are down to comparing apps to apps. Maybe a little bit of filesystem thrown in for giggles. I supposed DOS could have had a crappy timer interrupt or something, or crappy serial I/O interrupts. However, as I recall, most of the actual O/S of DOS was really in the BIOS, so blame the MoBo maker. The BIOS implemented all of the functionality to talk with hardware so DOS didn't have to write any real drivers.
As far as Linus not being a C programmer, go read his biographies and the early days of Linux. Go read interviews with his old roommate. He wasn't a C programmer. He originally started doing it in assembly. In fact the whole project was to learn more about the x86 assembly, it started as a terminal emulator.
He didn't know how sprintf worked. His roommate Lars implemented the original sprintf for the kernel for him.
Kirby
Worst Slashdot Article Ever (Score:5, Informative)
some Gentoo users have installed Gentoo on their new G5s without any problems whatsoever.
No. Only one entirely unreliable user made outrageous claims including running Gentoo. Not users but user.
while it takes one hour on the fastest P4 available.
The user said "my Pentium 4" without saying anything about what that Pentium 4 was. For all we know it could be an old 1.6Mhz with 128MB.
Pieter Van den Abeele, reported that the machine currently runs at half speed due to fan controlling hardware not yet supported.
He says that it may be possible to get the kernel working and if it did then it would run at half-speed. There is no "machine currently" running it to confirm this and it also proves that the other guy is lying.
The Gentoo team will post benchmarks, and will update installation instructions as soon as possible.
According to Abeele - "As far as I know, *none* of the Gentoo developers that are working on support for the G5." Now I guess that eventually they will benchmark and update installation instructions but it is obviously not on the radar screen right now.
The author of this article and pudge should be whipped for putting this awful article up.
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:4, Informative)
That's why Windows 3.11 could run on it. It's why DOS Extenders ran on it. DOS didn't *DO* anything other then command.com really, and a little bit of filesystem stuff. Once you started running DOS you pretty much had complete control of the hardware. The BIOS did most of the heavy lifting on serial I/O, writing to the screen, reading or writing from the floppy or harddrive. That's why the BIOS had to be reversed engineered before you could make another PC run DOS. The BIOS did all the work. It's also why DOS ran a load more hardware then Linux did (at the time).
You go get a copy of DOS, go get a copy of an old Linux 0.2 kernel. Fire up program that calculates primes. Neither one of them is particularly faster or slower then the other, assuming you used similar compilers. Do that again with Windows, and you'll probably find that Windows runs about 2-5% slower (last time I checked), due to context switching speed and generic overhead of the (GUI updates, and other subsystems you don't have to have on a Linux machine).
Kirby