April 7th, 2020 at 4:11 PM
I don't know how you guys do LFS or Gentoo. I never got the hang of either. Debian was easy to be and they say it's hard, but I've been using it for years. It's a matter of experience I suppose...
Compiling from source has some performance incentives at times because of all of the new instructions they've come out with. They compile these things to be compatible with SSE and below, those instructions are over 10 years old and AVX blows them out of the water. However, GCC doesn't generally compile for AVX512, etc. unless some special code is hand-written for it, which is a shame. At which point the Intel compiler is the only one that does.
It's a lot of untapped performance in my opinion. Clear Linux does this IIRC, but your run of the mill Ubuntu is more worried about compatibility.
Compiling from source has some performance incentives at times because of all of the new instructions they've come out with. They compile these things to be compatible with SSE and below, those instructions are over 10 years old and AVX blows them out of the water. However, GCC doesn't generally compile for AVX512, etc. unless some special code is hand-written for it, which is a shame. At which point the Intel compiler is the only one that does.
It's a lot of untapped performance in my opinion. Clear Linux does this IIRC, but your run of the mill Ubuntu is more worried about compatibility.
