At work, I’ve been getting a Gentoo/PPC system up and running on a fairly new (~half-year old) 2x800MHz/1.2GB Quicksilver PowerMac. It’s actually gone surprisingly well, the only real difference is fiddling with the mac-fdisk and yaboot stuff, but besides that, the install was pretty straightforward. I was sort of disappointed (not really surprised, though) by the not quite blazing compile times. I decided to run a little comparison against my Athlon 800MHz/512MB home system (not very scientific, my home system is running quite a few more daemons and is compiling a more featureful and larger kernel)
In anycase, here are some numbers for running a make clean bzImage modules modules_install on both systems:
| Athlon | PPC |
|---|---|
real 13m35.243s user 12m14.290s sys 0m50.400s |
real 14m34.575s user 13m40.770s sys 0m56.640s |
Yep, and this is running with ‘-j3’, both CPUs were being used. This actually seems to fall in line with the bogomips report, I guess. Here’s the /proc/cpuinfo for the systems. My home server:
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 6
model : 4
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) processor
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 800.059
cache size : 256 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca
cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
bogomips : 1595.80
And the Mac:
processor : 0 cpu : 7450, altivec supported clock : 799MHz revision : 2.1 (pvr 8000 0201) bogomips : 797.90 processor : 1 cpu : 7450, altivec supported clock : 799MHz revision : 2.1 (pvr 8000 0201) bogomips : 797.90 total bogomips : 1595.80 machine : PowerMac3,5 motherboard : PowerMac3,5 MacRISC2 MacRISC Power Macintosh detected as : 69 (PowerMac G4 Silver) pmac flags : 00000000 L2 cache : 256K unified memory : 1280MB pmac-generation : NewWorld
Now, at this point, if you’re still reading, you might be wondering, what’s the point? Honestly, I just did this little test mostly out of personal curiousity, after sitting around during the initial kernel compile (it took almost half-an hour without the j flag). Any developer or techie who uses both Mac and PCs can tell you that the Macs are much slower, hardware and software-wise (and blown out of the water when dollar/processing is factored in). Still, it was interesting to see my 2yr old hand-me-down-parts server beat out the much ‘beefier’ Mac (remember, the entire Gentoo system is custom-compiled on gcc3.2 w/ -O3 mcpu=7450 -maltivec -mabi=altivec -mpowerpc-gfxopt CFLAGS. It’s about as fast as I think it can get).
Also, in case you’re wondering, the Mac system was originally ordered w/ OS X Server (10.1) to be a workgorup file server, but after continually crapping out (in addition to being a bear to compile/install packages for), my co-worker tossed in the towel. I have nothing against Macs or OS X. It’s a nice OS, just crap as a server. Oh, and Jaguar is still slower than molasses on my 400MHz TiBook. The prettiness wears off when you get slowdowns scrolling.