On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:52:41 -0500 Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I didn't miss anything. I get what some are saying. The reason for > my question is this. Gentoo allows a person to customize the OS to > the specific hardware it is being run on. Redhat and other binary > distros don't allow this, unless you compile your own packages which > is no longer really a binary install. > > So, if I install Redhat on my machine, would it be less efficient than > my Gentoo install which is customized for my hardware? Has someone > else tested this and made it public? > > If people can't get this, never mind. > > Dale I have not really searched for such benchmarks for a while. I would take any such things with a grain of salt, if I did. Unless I want to devote the time to set up a series of application specific tests, and test them on multiple platforms on MY hardware, such results would be almost useless to me. I am sure that there are such tests out there - Computer Science and Engineering departments at Universities have certainly run such tests - whether they are public or not, is another story. Also, if you could specifically define "efficient", it would be helpful, at least to narrow down what you're looking for. If you mean, accomplishing the same task with the fewest instructions, that is difficult to test, and very dependent on Kernel, library and compiler versions. If you mean faster, that is more hardware dependent, unless you're dealing with some very poorly written code. Efficient does not always mean faster - as others have pointed out, binary distos are faster to install than source based distros. FreeBSD is faster than GNU/Linux on some tasks, and overall is more UNIX-like, since it was a Berkeley developed version of UNIX. This has been tested on other people's hardware. Would that necessarily compare to mine or yours? We don't know that, since we have NOT tested them on each of our sets of hardware. E.g. FreeBSD uses an older version of just about everything, so I cannot optimize the compiler for my Core-i7-avx processor. I can do this with Gentoo (or any other GNU/Linux distro that I choose to 'optimize' by compiling from source). Just my $0.02, Chris
