Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on February 11, 2005 04:40 PM
Well, a few things off the top of my head... a program compiled to support 386s compared to one compiled specifically for PPro+ will commonly result in 15-20% performance increases. 4.x included support for 386 CPUs in GENERIC... it also includes support for EISA, every SCSI and network device known to god or man, every RAID device, your Diamond Rio MP3 Player, TCP/IP over the parallel port, as well as numerous other usefull goodies all statically linked into the kernel. I haven't seen an x86 Linux distro do this in many many moons (I'm not even 100% sure you even CAN do this anymore, but I'd say it's 98% likely) Irregardless, I'm positive this was NOT done with the Linux install.
Further, he specifically did NOT use the ports version on any platform... this means that any OS-specific tweaks in the ports system didn't get applied.
But comparing ANYTHING with a BSD GENERIC kernel will yield somewhat biased results... even worse with the 4.x systems (5.x no longer allows 386 support in the same kernel which supports 486 CPUs to avoid such issues)
However, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unfair to do this... I doubt he spent 30 minutes carefully selecting kernel build options for the Linux distro, just as he didn't do the same thing for the BSDs... if Linux happens to give a more optimized kernel "out of the box", that means more Linux systems will have an optimized kernel (But the fact that other distros flat out wouldnt' work with his hardware is telling)
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Re:Gentoo unfair advantage
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on February 11, 2005 04:40 PMFurther, he specifically did NOT use the ports version on any platform... this means that any OS-specific tweaks in the ports system didn't get applied.
But comparing ANYTHING with a BSD GENERIC kernel will yield somewhat biased results... even worse with the 4.x systems (5.x no longer allows 386 support in the same kernel which supports 486 CPUs to avoid such issues)
However, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unfair to do this... I doubt he spent 30 minutes carefully selecting kernel build options for the Linux distro, just as he didn't do the same thing for the BSDs... if Linux happens to give a more optimized kernel "out of the box", that means more Linux systems will have an optimized kernel (But the fact that other distros flat out wouldnt' work with his hardware is telling)
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