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)
Predictive compiling in Xcode (Score:3, Insightful)
and if you are so lucky to work in a room with a lot of these there's the distributed compile via rendevouz.
Re:Maybe this explains the speeds seen (Score:1)
JP
Re:Maybe this explains the speeds seen (Score:1)
I can't wait to see (Score:4, Interesting)
How teh fuck? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How teh fuck? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How teh fuck? (Score:1)
Anyway, my first thought when I read the most recent messages in the thread was, vapor...
Re:How teh fuck? (Score:1)
Re:How teh fuck? (Score:1)
Re:How teh fuck? (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Linking to a Forum? (Score:2)
I gotta agree with the original poster about the silent part. I was in the Dallas area Apple Store a couple of weeks ago and noticed how quite the place was... except whenever I walked past an MDD G4! Every other Mac model (not just the G5) was wonderfully silent. Steve Jobs may be crazy, but he's a genius.
compile time? (Score:5, Interesting)
No kidding... my Athlon XP 2500 took about 15 hours to compile KDE. You can't even download all the KDE packages in 15 minutes.
Besides, the actual "kde" ebuild is nothing more than a little flag that says yes indeed, I installed all the other KDE packages: kdebase, kdenetwork, kdemultimedia, kdeaddons, kdeedu, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdeadmin, kdeutils, kdeartwork and kdepim.
Fortunately, you don't need to install each one if you want to use KDE's basic functions.
Re:compile time? (Score:3, Funny)
You can if you download all the languages.
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.
Re:compile time? (Score:1)
Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus, Mac OS X plays very nicely with Linux boxes and they know it. I just hope Apple will help the small Linux on Mac community integrate their software and proprietary hardware for at least full functionality. I have a feeling they will.
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:5, Interesting)
Second, Linux could have been written in a lot less time if it had been designed from the beginning to end up what it is (it might not be as good, but it could have been pretty good a lot sooner then it was). The concept that SMP existed. Having somebody who knew what the hell they we're doing at the beginning of it. Linus is a damned genious now, but when he started it, he wasn't a C programmer at all. Which leads me to guess, he wasn't much of a UNIX programmer at the time (let alone an experienced kernel programmer). It wasn't like he designed around the concept of having SMP, or even optimized disk accesses. Scalability wasn't a big deal. Running with more then 8MB of RAM was impossible (he only had 8, so if you had more and wanted to use it, you had to fix it yourself). Second, it's a whole heck of a lot easier to write an OS when the platform is relatively fixed (yeah it needs to work under x86, but if it doesn't, that's not Apple's problem).
Kirby
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:3, Interesting)
When I first started using Linux, it was at version 0.2 back in 1991/92 or thereabouts. It was blazingly fast on my 486 -- naturally, text mode only but it made MSDOS shit its pants. What I saw back then was certainly not the result of someone who's "not a C programmer at all".
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 fo
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:2)
Sorry, I generally don't proofread replies while at work.
Kirby
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
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:3, Insightful)
What will Apple release in 2005 to match Longhorn?
All I know is that as an enduser, Apple is very much meeting my expectations. As an enduser, are users of Windows XP and eventually Longhorn having their expectations met?
How many RPC vulnerabilities a year is that again?
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:4, Interesting)
I was not much of a NeXT user (only used it a handful of times). However, their development kit, especially their AppBuilder stuff was incredible (I used that on other platforms). I've heard about the feature set the OS had in 1991 was pretty impressive. I used to work in a room full of people who talked about the wonders that NeXT was at the time. NeXT was an incredible OS from everyone I've heard from (I know at least 3 independent sources of people I trust who say that). It's largest two failings, were interrelated. It was too expensive, and nobody made third party applications for it. It was right there with Amiga and OS/2 in terms of wonderful OS that nobody used.
Re:Hopefully, Apple will help (Score:2)
Granted, even the hardware was before it's time. But schools had a hard time purchasing it. When they did, they loved the systems (atleast at Ohio State we did).
But it was so expensive, especially when someone would question the purchase against a PC or Mac at that time.
Once NeXTStep for Intel came out, that made things a little easier. But, by then, it was almost too late.
The real test. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The real test. (Score:2)
Not to sound cynical, but is that really all that useful of benchmark? You only compile Mozilla once.
Re:The real test. (Score:2, Funny)
You're not a Gentoo user, are you?
Re:The real test. (Score:2)
No, I use Windows. I don't have to deal with having to compile stuff.
I realize it's useful in the *nix world (even done a bit of that when I tried Linux out) but we're not talking about time critical stuff here unless you're a developer. (Granted, that could be the killer app for this machine, if the number of developers out there was a lot higher.)
I prefer rendering benchmarks where time really does equate to money, but unfortunately my previous argument about mass
Re:The real test. (Score:1, Funny)
Re:The real test. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can't realize that, well, I can't help you...
Re:The real test. (Score:2)
There's Camino, there's Mozilla, and there's Firebird, so there's three different builds to play with on the same source tree. Then there's the fact that new bugs get fixed all the time.
I used to do it nightly, maybe a year ago, before Camino was developed.
Re:The real test. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The real test. (Score:1)
Re:The real test. (Score:2)
17 megabytes? That's so small, I don't think I would even see the copy progress dialog half the time.
Re:The real test. (Score:1)
Re:The real test. (Score:1)
Re:The real test. (Score:2)
Well duh, 5>4 (Score:5, Funny)
Can slashdot please tell us something that's not common knowledge? I mean geez, next the'll be like: Saddam Masterminded 9/11. Well no duh!
The above post, condensed to 5 words (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The above post, condensed to 5 words (Score:2)
Re:The above post, condensed to 5 words (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The above post, condensed to 5 words (Score:2)
Re:Well duh, 54 (Score:2, Funny)
----
fastb - lol apple have the g5 out. its must be slower than the p4 because they have so many more revisions to get through! next up is h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 then i1, i2... up to p1, p2, p3, p4! LOL!
kev[0] -I just read that three times and I think I'm dumber for it.
----
Re:Well duh, 54 (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Well duh, 54 (Score:1)
place your bets (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:place your bets (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:place your bets (Score:2)
Buy the Apple.
Re:place your bets (Score:1)
RS6000 boxes are made to last. Apple hardware is made to sell the customer another box in two to three years.
Re:place your bets (Score:2)
Of course it's becoming obsolete and I'm drooling over the G5s, but Apple hardware usually lasts a loooong time. I still have a mac SE in the basement that worked fine the last time I plugged it in.
Re:place your bets (Score:1)
Re:place your bets (Score:2)
IBM has plans to sell Linux workstations using the PPC970 chip. However, they will never be called "G5".
Re:place your bets (Score:1)
Re:place your bets (Score:2)
in other news: (Score:3, Funny)
What he compiled... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What he compiled... (Score:1)
Re:What he compiled... (Score:1)
Anyway, if you want benchmarks, why aren't you looking at www.spec.org?
Oh yeah, because Apple have had a hissy fit and don't submit any results any more.
YAW.
Re:What he compiled... (Score:1)
Re:What he compiled... (Score:2)
164.gzip 1400 Data compression utility
175.vpr 1400 FPGA circuit placement and routing
176.gcc 1100 C compiler
181.mcf 1800 Minimum cost network flow solver
186.crafty 1000 Chess program
197.parser 1800 Natural language processing
252.eon 1300 Ray tracing
253.perlbmk 1800 Perl
254.gap 1100 Comput
Re:What he compiled... (Score:1)
And you did that as AC - sheesh, what a tosser.
YAW.
Re:What he compiled... (Score:2)
"P4" covers a *lot* of possible configurations. It's about as helpful as saying it was four times faster than his "G4".
Processor performance has never been my limit (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Processor performance has never been my limit (Score:1, Funny)
*gag*
Re:Processor performance has never been my limit (Score:2)
Re:Processor performance has never been my limit (Score:2)
I think Unix-like operating systems have been doing that in the OS itself for, what, two decades now? Oooooh, now the hard drive can do it too, for when you're running crappy Redmondware.
Re:Processor performance has never been my limit (Score:2)
ram disks? (Score:1)
on smallish projects I've seen huge increases in compile speed when using a ram disk, even if only for the compiled output.
with up to 8 gb of ram I wonder if this will be a more common technique on the G5s...
Re:ram disks? (Score:2)
However I have found what makes a much better case today is to just let the ram sit as a disk cache and let the system determine what the best use is.
It is really fun what you can do with 4 Xeon's and 16 GB memory as well - I loved the compile speeds you got in that system
Re:Processor performance has never been my limit (Score:2)
This may have been true once, but not anymore. Processor speed is by far the most important thing af
Wow... informative headline (Score:5, Funny)
"Linux is fast on a new fast computer"
I mean, come on...
Re:Wow... informative headline (Score:5, Funny)
"Linux is fast on a new fast computer"
I mean, come on...
I guess my submission was rejected... "Gentoo is slow on an old G3"
Re:Wow... informative headline (Score:1)
But it's damned cool running X on a dinkyscreen Mac.
15 minutes?! (Score:1)
Anyone remember how fast the G3 and G4 chips were in SETI compared to Intel chips?
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:About twice as fast. (Score:2)
-Fred
Re:15 minutes?! (Score:3, Funny)
Bullshit (Score:2, Informative)
if it was real (Score:2, Interesting)
compile times don't impress me any more, although they sometimes do reflect overall (disk i/o included) performance.
Re:if it was real (Score:2)
make vs. ant (Score:1)
This reminds me of someone who said that Ant was the bestest greatest build tool, because it built our whole app in like 15 seconds. Of course, make sucks.
He failed to recognize that it is trival to get make to behave like ant in compiling Java applications by restructuring the rules (pass all the
Re:make vs. ant (Score:2)
Trivial. What a great word. In this case it means 'if you know exactly how everything should happen, and your make allows arbitrarily long command line expansion (which not all of them do, certainly) and you don't mind something that is, frankly, a hideous hack, then yes, it's... 'trivial.'
-Fred
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.
Even faster if... (Score:2)
Re:Getoo won't run on my G5 (Score:1)