[conspire] Re: conspire Digest, Vol 14, Issue 7

[Rick Moen]

Quoting bruce coston (jane_ikari at yahoo.com):

> the new YOPER claims 2 run faster than other distro's

Kinda cute when distro-makers post claims like that, isn't it?

The Web site claims this is on account of...

o  686-optimised compiling
o  2.6.7 kernel
o  ReiserFS
o  Stripped binaries (no debugging info)
o  Prelinked binaries
o  Keeping dependencies to a minimum
o  IDE tweaking using hdparm

The Linux world gets a new batch of compile-from-source people every few
years claiming miracles from this-or-that set of compilation options.  
Richard Couture and I tried this out during the heyday of the Pentium
Compiler Group (makers of what became gcc 2.9/3.x, the first gcc series
to support better than 486 optimisation).  For almost all code, fiddling
with the compiler flags made no difference whatsoever to performance:  
You could set -march=i686 and so on, and all you end up doing is padding
out your integer variables with extra nulls.  For a few X11 binaries,
you could get a 15% gain in speed.

Prelinking improves _startup_ time for dynamically linked applications, 
but no other aspect of performance.  There's the disadvantage that every
time you update the program or its libs, you have to remember to
re-prelink, or the app breaks.

Stripping binaries seems like a good idea -- until you're trying to
debug something.

Tweaking systems using hdparm, using a 2.6.7 kernel, and use of
ReiserFS (which I know you like) is equally available on any other
distirbution, for those who like them.  Note that hdparm isn't used by
default on Linux distributions generally because it causes massive data
corruption on some ATA (IDE) chipsets, and therefore needs to applied
selectively.


However, all that having been said, Yoper seems to be a fairly well
thought out, high-performance desktop system for i686 and up.  I
personally wouldn't be really thrilled about the Slackware-derived
package management, or the Red Hat startup scripts, but chacun a son
gout.

> it got sound on my box w/o a kernel recompile.

Good news.

> I'd like 2try that if its still 1 cd, please burn 1 for me and maybe
> someone can coordinate it coming to svlug sat.

OK.  I'm pulling down ftp://us2.yoper.com/pub/linux/yoper/yos-i686-2.0.0-9.iso
at the moment, and will have it for Saturday.  I sure hope the "s" in
"yos" doesn't mean "source code disk".  It's the only ISO listed.

(I think "yos" is actually "Your Operating System", the full name of
Yoper.)