On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 12:26:15PM -0400, David Cary Hart wrote:
Most of the Fedora RPMS are provided as i386. These can easily be
recompiled as:
rpmbuild --target i686 --rebuild package.src.rpm
a. Is it worth it? In other words, is there really a performance gain in
packages like - say - KDE?
b. Assuming that I installed the RPM sources and built from the spec
file, as long as I am at it, could I also benefit by changing some of
the FLAGS?
For example:
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CFLAGS="-march=pentium4 -O3 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer"
You will only know for sure if you try it.
However I look at the activity on my system and it is mostly
idle or when sluggish disk I/O bound. This tells me that
CPU specific optimizations are not critical for my use.
In my opinion the most productive place for code optimizations is
library functions not common application space.
A productive operational trick that feels like an optimization is a
little readahead script that keeps my commonly used bits (applications
and libraries) in DRAM. See /etc/init.d/readahead
--
T o m M i t c h e l l
Just say no to 74LS73 in 2004