[Pan-users] Re: Re: ANN: Pan 0.97 "Atoz and Tanda"

[Duncan]

walt <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 17 May 2006 11:05:34
-0700:

> Duncan wrote:
> 
>> Off the wall question, but how much memory do you have, and you are on
>> x86, right?...
> 
> Half-gig of memory, AMD K7.  I ran vmstat while building just now, and
> 'free' memory never got very close to zero, but something about 2MB in
> size did get swapped out at one point (X was not running).

So it would appear x86 use is half or a third of amd64 use at that point
in the compile.  The larger address pointers and the like could account
for part of that, but the rest would appear to back up my contention that
the gcc 4.x rewrite was the first time amd64 support could really be
considered from the ground up, that before that, it was simply "bolted on"
to gcc, and that gcc 4.1 is therefore the biggest advance for amd64
support since 3.3 added -march=k8 and 3.2 added initial support, and that
it follows that the 4.1 upgrade is much more significant for amd64 than
for x86.  (4.0 had the rewrite, but /just/ the rewrite, and an effort to
not have too many regressions, so 4.1 is the first of the 4.x series to
really see noticeable improvements.)  4.1 does add some improvements for
x86, but they aren't nearly as significant as the chances for amd64,
simply because gcc already had mature x86 support and has had it for a
long time, while amd64 support is still seeing dramatic improvements.

>> BTW, Gentoo's slotting and gcc-config make it easy to have multiple gcc
>> versions installed and switch between them...
> 
> That's one of my favorite features of gentoo.  But libtool is always a
> pain in the backside when switching between compilers.  The one thing
> gentoo doesn't do when switching between compilers is to rebuild libtool.

Aye, but fix-libtool-files.sh does help, there.  =8^)  It's not perfect,
but then I've seen libtool in general described as a poor hack of a
solution that while it does solve one set of issues, creates an entirely
different set, and that being the case, I'm not sure a perfect solution is
available. =8^(

Thanks!  Very useful info!



-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman