16 ms·

That was Gentoo for me - it took forever to build but then the realization that all this autoprobes and other self-configuring things were taking an awful long

• II2II 1y ago
  The irony is that I started recompiling the kernel because it wouldn't detect a SCSI card unless parameters were passed to the kernel ... then I learned how long autoprobing was taking for hardware that I didn't even have! Did Gentoo provide much of a performance bump back then? I never really bothered with it since I was stuck with a 486 for the longest time, and by the time I did upgrade distributions were starting to offer "i586" builds (or something to that effect).
  • bombcar 1y ago
    The real performance gains were just about the -i386 to pentium jump; a bunch of distros only shipped the most compatible code and didn’t use the newer instructions. I always found that optimizing for size and using the exact march/mcpu worked nicely. But the biggest part I liked was being able to turn off features I didn’t need (like mpg123 in a headless server NOT pulling in X).