Subject: Re: From the Gentoo front, (was Re: [linux-audio-user] Demudi and alsa)
From: Ross Vandegrift (ross_AT_willow.seitz.com)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 18:50:37 EEST
On Thu, Aug 01, 2002 at 05:45:19AM -0500, Robert Brown wrote:
> I have to agree 1000%. Not only does Gentoo excell because of the fact
> that you have several high performance kernels at your fingertips, but
> also because everything is built from source with optimizations for
> *your* system. Gentoo performs noticeably better than binary_based
> distros on most systems for this very reason.
As someone who rolled his own distros for around three years (before
going back to Slackware when I realized I was just building Slackware),
this is a myth. It makes a difference in applications that are very
computationally intensive, and benefit from any and all specific code to
tune toward a processor.
But most things that you use on a day-to-day basis (X, various window
managers, emacs, gcc, audacity, ecasound, MuSe) are I/O bound - they can
only go as fast as data can be fed in and out. Recompiling them for your
processor will make minimal difference.
*HOWEVER*, since this is an audio list, real-time effects processing is
a CPU bound task - building your own optimized LADSPA plugins could be a
huge win if the ones you have now aren't performing as well as you'd
like. The more performance you can eek out of real-time processing, the
more you'll be able to do in real-time.
Ross Vandegrift
ross_AT_willow.seitz.com
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