> In the early days, there was much promotion of Gentoo as being “faster”, because you could compile everything based on your particular processor, etc. And you could increase the optimization level for a boost. Their web site still touts this as a reason to use Gentoo.
> In reality, the performance is more or less the same as on any other distribution. The folks who stick to Gentoo tend not to care about performance as much. Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site.
I'm still on Gentoo 22 years later.
Good timing! If memory serves, you missed the Big Libpng Upgrade that either got the concept of Package Slots into Portage or convinced everyone that they were a _really_ good feature to have and use where appropriate.
Based on what I can see after putting a minute or two into searching, that verbiage being referred to only appears on the About page. [0]
The distro's home page says
Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution.
And -speaking as a Gentoo user since 2002- neither the user community nor the maintainer community hold the opinion that Ultimate Maxxximum Performance is the distro's goal. Trouble reports that come from "ricers" pretty much always get told "Set your compiler flags to something sane (try '-O2 -pipe' or '-O2 -pipe -march=native') and rebuild. If you can still repro the problem, file a new report because this one is getting closed INVALID.".
And -while the old Gentoo Wiki burned down so I can't prove it- [4] the advice about GCC optimization in the wiki has always cautioned against using aggressive compiler flags and warned that doing so will -among other things- not substantially improve performance. The advice about reasonable compiler flags has pretty consistently been "Use -O2, -pipe, -march=$THE_CORRECT_SETTING_FOR_YOUR_CPU, and maybe -fomit-frame-pointer"... though the "-fomit-frame-pointer" advice has always come with a warning that doing that may make debugging either extremely difficult or impossible, and the "-march" advice the warning that this may make it impossible to run those binaries on another computer.
Anyway. There's only so much you can do to erase an -allegedly- pervasive myth. The fact that some folks have the belief that Gentoo Linux is all about Maxxximum Performance doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the people who use it and -almost certainly- all of the people who maintain it strongly disagree with that claim. The distro is and always has been about flexibility, user choice, and having fun. And it's a nice bonus if building for -say- -march=athlon-xp instead of -march=i586 happens to get you a bit of extra performance here and there.
[0] <https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/about/>
[1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20230101024843/https://www.gento...>
[2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20150406115846/https://www.gento...>
[3] That year's April 1 redesign was a bit cool, IMO.
[4] The oldest copy that I can easily find is from mid 2013 [5], so you'll just have to trust me that this has been the long-standing opinion of the overwhelming majority of users and maintainers. While you're there, take a minute or two to skim the prose and notice how it consistently warns against using aggressive compiler flags.
[5] <https://web.archive.org/web/20130829083155/https://wiki.gent...>
> Extreme configurability, performance, and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.
It's the performance part I was referring to.
Going back to when I started using it:
> Gentoo Linux is a high-performance ports-based Linux metadistribution
Regarding -O2 vs -O3, in the early days, -O3 was considered quite safe (I don't recall if it was recommended, but it wasn't discouraged). I think only after a certain GCC upgrade did they start discouraging -O3. I vaguely recall them announcing that quite a few of the -O3 benefits were now part of -O2, and that some (new?) -O3 stuff was unstable.
At the time, I knew little about compiler flags. I went with -O3 because of guidance from the Gentoo folks.
Yep, when I started using it in _2002_ that was on the home page. Ten years ago, it stopped being on the home page because folks finally got the motivation to do a bunch of work to it. As I said:
Its home page has spoken about flexibility and has not spoken about performance since the big redesign in *April 2016*... seven years prior to the publication of that guy's blog post.
There's only so much you can do to erase an -allegedly- pervasive myth. The fact that some folks have the belief that Gentoo Linux is all about Maxxximum Performance doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the people who use it and -almost certainly- all of the people who maintain it strongly disagree with that claim.
It has been too long for me to remember what -O level my first Gentoo box ended up using (and I can't be bothered to pull it out of the closet and power it on to see), but the box I installed in ~2007 is using -O2. A random sampling of the few Gentoo forum posts from the early days that are in the Wayback Machine [0], as well as a handful of Bugzilla reports from the 2002->2005 era _suggests_ that most folks in the early days were using -O2. I'm certain that I played with all of the optimization levels on my first box, didn't notice any performance difference, and then settled on one that I can no longer remember.
And like, you say that -O3 wasn't discouraged. Well, -O3 isn't really discouraged today. The advice about -O3 gives you a summary of the facts and trusts you to make the choice that's right for you [1][2]
WARNING: Using `-O3` may cause some packages to break either during the compilation or misbehave at runtime, although `-O3` retains standard conformance, hence any breakage is either undefined behaviour in the application, or (very rarely) a compiler bug.
<irrelevant stuff elided>
`-O3`: enables `-O2` as well as optimizations that are expensive in terms of compile time and memory usage. Compiling with `-O3` is likely to improve performance (although not guaranteed). While historically `-O3` could expose compiler bugs, nowadays issues with `-O3` are almost always instances of undefined behavior (UB) and the code is at fault and should be fixed. Some packages are still known-broken with `-O3`. Using `-O3` is not recommended unless running test suites for packages.
FWIW, it's my maybe-incorrect understanding that many (most? all?) packages that are known-broken with specific flags get those flags filtered out and replaced with known-good ones... unless they're nutball "ricer" flags, in which case the user gets told "Don't do that!".
[0] <https://web.archive.org/web/20020922020122/https://forums.ge...>
[1] <https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/GCC_optimization#-O>
[2] Even the advice from a decade ago [3] is substantially similar: «This makes compilation take longer, and it not only might not make things faster, it may make things slower and is known to break things sometimes.»
[3] <https://wiki.gentoo.org/index.php?title=GCC_optimization&old...>
It is now but in the 32-bit days there was a nontrivial boost form compiling for e.g. a Pentium 4 when most binary distros were still stuck targetting generic i586 or something old like that.
Linux wouldn't exist if people submitted to that argument.
There's not much of an argument for adopting obscure niche practices for their own sake
The Ubuntu users are only there because after they had told the rest of us how silly we were for using Linux they eventually had to use it themselves for work.
Now we're going to listen to that sort of stuff again without rolling our eyes? ....
I started using linux in 1994 with slackware. Nowadays I use ubuntu, I've spent too many hours of my life tweaking my linux installs.
Nevertheless I remember lots of my friends who started off saying Linux was hopeless and ended up using it and Ubuntu was their gateway. The Linux world now is full of people who are fairly conformist and don't care about how it all began and who don't value the idea that open source has margins from which who knows what world beating things might eventually come. The fact that margins can exist is what makes open source great.
building from source has uses which you believe are worthless and other people don't think are worthless.
Anyone who uses cargo or installs a module for golang is building from source. But that, probably, is considered useful. It's only people who build C code from source who are niche and wierd. ....
The bigger problem, to me, is that it’s not really clear why this is actually a problem for Gentoo. I am glad they perform user-facing source builds, however, because they see things that other distributors don’t.
If you insist on acting like a normal person, no one stops you from using something normal.
Now though? It's way easier to have a herd of unicorn docker containers running that each handle one weird thing in isolation.
By just adding
preempt=full
sudo rpm-ostree kargs --editor