Nikos Chantziaras wrote:

> ben.kevan@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> Can you give a little more of a rundown of how it was done. What
>> version of GCC were you running (meaning compiled from source or from
>> a opensuse repo)..
>> I may have to try this on a test machine before I do it on my
>> production machine, but man.. sounds good.
>
> Uhm, the above is on a Gentoo box. I mentioned openSUSE because that's
> my main system, and now it seems slow compared to Gentoo.
>
> I never compiled openSUSE from source; that's just too hairy to do.

Binary distribution kernels and libraries - the most important one
being /glibc/ - are typically compiled for generic architectures - the same
is true for everything in the system, actually, but the kernel and /glibc/
have the biggest footprint on the performance curve.

Even with /x86_64,/ they make use of generic "optimizations" that will run
equally well - or equally poor, depending on how you value it - on AMD and
Intel.

Gentoo is a source-based distribution and will thus most of the time be
compiled for your specific hardware, unless you stick to the pre-compiled
binary packages, which is what a lot of n00bs do - that way, they can brag
about running Gentoo without having to get their hands dirty <grin> - and
thus Gentoo will always have a faster feel than any other distro - LFS not
included. ;-)

--
Aragorn
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)