5 ms·

"An advantage of having Gentoo as the base for this distro is its package manager, Portage, which has a system of enabling/disabling compile-time options for ap

by gaze 4y ago

"An advantage of having Gentoo as the base for this distro is its package manager, Portage, which has a system of enabling/disabling compile-time options for applications. This means application binaries can be tailored to the user’s computer hardware and the user’s needs." This is less beneficial than Gentoo fans seem to think it is.

LanternLight83 4y ago
Maybe it was all placebo, but Gentoo's use flags are super well organized, and are one of the first things I missed when I transitioned to functional distros. You can still apply bulk transformation functions to every package (like those CPU optimizations, Guix even has a flag for this), or configure the flags in build phases by defining package variants, (some of which are provided in functional package repos, not often), but it's a lot of work. The Gentoo way of doing things pit the user in control and had a feeling of minimalism in the portage configuration files, straightforward use of directory structures to define masks and overrides, ubiquitous atom selectors. Even if it was only minutely beneficial, or caused "more trouble than it's worth", I remember it for how empowered it made me feel and how easy it was to manage. The same optimizations are much harder to preform in amy other distro, and that says something regardless of their effectiveness.
throwawayKiwi9 4y ago
Some people really care about milliseconds.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  In music production, milliseconds can mean the difference between being able to play perfectly (due to low-latency feedback) and making mistakes every couple of bars (due to high-latency feedback). Try playing an instrument while listening to 100ms delayed feedback - it's practically impossible to stay on the beat.
  - throwawayKiwi9 4y ago
    Yes, and Gentoo makes highly fine-tuned optimizations very manageable. For most, this is not very practical, but it may offer some millisecond-level improvements for those looking for it. Being able to strictly compile for your preferred audio stack could be beneficial. My fastest booting machine was definitely Gentoo with a custom kernel. Any audio improvements may be purely theoretical here, but maybe not. I would be curious to see benchmarks or anecdotes from anyone who's needed to do this themselves.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      > but it may offer some millisecond-level improvements DA latency is a factor of processing speed when converting analog signals to digital information. The issue arrises with older hardware when individually tracking large numbers of channels, such as 64 or 128 simultaneously. Leaps in CPU speed increases have somewhat stalled due to the limits of Moore's Law and physics yet have done so at acceptably fast speeds for audio. Though the smallest latency a human can hear is about 20ms, it is easy and practical to reduce latency by scrutinizing signal path.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Audio bandwidth requirements are small. Latency hasn't especially been an issue in professional digital audio production for decades. While analog signal latency is still what it is, it practically is not any issue below distances of thousands of miles, nor is it getting any worse. That said, even though Gentoo isn't as brain-dead simple to install and get working as most other distros, I think this is a cool idea. But installing Ardour, Audacity and Cadence on any distro would get you most of the way there with very little difference in performance on modern hardware. I think popularity would increase if these tools were neatly packaged for any distro. But if the hardware was older and very limited, Gentoo would be the way to go, with a slight Gentoo learning curve.
    - BizarroLand 4y ago
      Minor kibbitz, but I wouldn't say, "latency hasn't been a problem for decades" in professional digital audio production. Maybe for studios that shelled out 5 large for a protools setup, but for smaller and non-protools pro recording studios latency is still a potential factor today. Anything USB 2.0 would have latency if you were doing anything to the incoming audio live (like running a little reverb plugin on vocals) then it very well could cause audio latency and or stuttering issues. Thunderbolt & USB 3.0 seems to have solved this (unless you are piping a lot of effects live on a weaker machine) but those only started hitting their stride 4-5 years ago.
_8j50 4y ago
If you mean cpu instruction optimization yeah but there are other compiler flags that affect performance and security.
hansvm 4y ago
The main alternative is to build packages with all such flags and disable the functionality you don't want at runtime. That's moderately less desirable because: - Space/performance, to the extent that dead code elimination matters. - Not all packages support such runtime manipulation. - Doing so requires additional work from the installer to configure entrypoints or from the user post-installation to set up that config. There's something really clean and easy about being able to enable/disable a feature in one place.

by gaze 4y ago

LanternLight83 4y ago

Maybe it was all placebo, but Gentoo's use flags are super well organized, and are one of the first things I missed when I transitioned to functional distros. You can still apply bulk transformation functions to every package (like those CPU optimizations, Guix even has a flag for this), or configure the flags in build phases by defining package variants, (some of which are provided in functional package repos, not often), but it's a lot of work. The Gentoo way of doing things pit the user in control and had a feeling of minimalism in the portage configuration files, straightforward use of directory structures to define masks and overrides, ubiquitous atom selectors. Even if it was only minutely beneficial, or caused "more trouble than it's worth", I remember it for how empowered it made me feel and how easy it was to manage. The same optimizations are much harder to preform in amy other distro, and that says something regardless of their effectiveness.

throwawayKiwi9 4y ago

Some people really care about milliseconds.

bheadmaster 4y ago
In music production, milliseconds can mean the difference between being able to play perfectly (due to low-latency feedback) and making mistakes every couple of bars (due to high-latency feedback). Try playing an instrument while listening to 100ms delayed feedback - it's practically impossible to stay on the beat.
- throwawayKiwi9 4y ago
  Yes, and Gentoo makes highly fine-tuned optimizations very manageable. For most, this is not very practical, but it may offer some millisecond-level improvements for those looking for it. Being able to strictly compile for your preferred audio stack could be beneficial. My fastest booting machine was definitely Gentoo with a custom kernel. Any audio improvements may be purely theoretical here, but maybe not. I would be curious to see benchmarks or anecdotes from anyone who's needed to do this themselves.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > but it may offer some millisecond-level improvements DA latency is a factor of processing speed when converting analog signals to digital information. The issue arrises with older hardware when individually tracking large numbers of channels, such as 64 or 128 simultaneously. Leaps in CPU speed increases have somewhat stalled due to the limits of Moore's Law and physics yet have done so at acceptably fast speeds for audio. Though the smallest latency a human can hear is about 20ms, it is easy and practical to reduce latency by scrutinizing signal path.
- Maursault 4y ago
  Audio bandwidth requirements are small. Latency hasn't especially been an issue in professional digital audio production for decades. While analog signal latency is still what it is, it practically is not any issue below distances of thousands of miles, nor is it getting any worse. That said, even though Gentoo isn't as brain-dead simple to install and get working as most other distros, I think this is a cool idea. But installing Ardour, Audacity and Cadence on any distro would get you most of the way there with very little difference in performance on modern hardware. I think popularity would increase if these tools were neatly packaged for any distro. But if the hardware was older and very limited, Gentoo would be the way to go, with a slight Gentoo learning curve.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    Minor kibbitz, but I wouldn't say, "latency hasn't been a problem for decades" in professional digital audio production. Maybe for studios that shelled out 5 large for a protools setup, but for smaller and non-protools pro recording studios latency is still a potential factor today. Anything USB 2.0 would have latency if you were doing anything to the incoming audio live (like running a little reverb plugin on vocals) then it very well could cause audio latency and or stuttering issues. Thunderbolt & USB 3.0 seems to have solved this (unless you are piping a lot of effects live on a weaker machine) but those only started hitting their stride 4-5 years ago.

_8j50 4y ago

If you mean cpu instruction optimization yeah but there are other compiler flags that affect performance and security.

hansvm 4y ago

The main alternative is to build packages with all such flags and disable the functionality you don't want at runtime. That's moderately less desirable because: - Space/performance, to the extent that dead code elimination matters. - Not all packages support such runtime manipulation. - Doing so requires additional work from the installer to configure entrypoints or from the user post-installation to set up that config. There's something really clean and easy about being able to enable/disable a feature in one place.