What is this website about?

If you follow Gentoo's philosophical ideas, you might have already understood that having a precompiled system targeting any x86 platform is not the best thing that you could expect from a software.

You (as many other before) already know that a software that pop up in 10 second doesn't give a real-time feeling (even if it took from then only 0.1sec to do something).

So what? Compile everything with the best optimization available for your hardware.

Prelink things that, once deployed, are not supposed to change often. It seems easy as it sounds.

It's not.

Why Gentoo is not enough?

Great, you reached the level 2! So let's try to explain what is wrong with the "common" Gentoo way.

First, when installing Gentoo, you are creating a new operating system on your hardware platform. To do so, you simply change one thing in a file (/etc/make.conf), specifying what you want, and what you reject.
Then, you set up the common CFLAGS export, and CXXFLAGS for C++ stuff. Then you bootstrap your system, compile the whole thing, and enjoy (at least for the luckiest people).

You are then glad to tell your friend that your system is the best one, etc.

You are wrong.

Even the best tuned system wide CFLAGS will not give you the best performance. Because it is not possible, it has been tested and re-tested (see Distro Day).

Is it the reason why my RedHat, Mandrake, Debian is quicker?

On alternative distributions, precompiled packages are checked to be compatible, and fast. Sometimes GCC with -O2 gives better results than a GCC -O3 -fomit-frame-pointer and so on. It is not due to GCC nor software programmer, it is due to algorithms themselves that can't be optimized correctly with the current compiler optimization schemes.

If you just google about Gentoo review (Distro day), you will see that a debian on a Pentium 4 system performs better (in -O2) than a gentoo in -O3. Try it by yourself if you can't believe it.

So what to do?

Before trying to recompile the whole stuff with O2 flag and any other flag, be patient, there is a solution. First, read the acovea site. Then read the following:

Optimizing CFLAGS for each software is a needed thing

You can help GCC developers (and Gentoo users) by sharing your results

Then you will get the very best from your computer.

Finally what is this site about?

This site is simply a place where to store each alcovea results for each software on each hardware (duh!)

There is 4 parts in this site : How to apply : Save a result : Show users results : News about this site

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To help us maintain this website :

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