Re: Too good to believe?

Robert HYATT (hyatt@cis.uab.edu)
Mon, 25 May 1998 09:06:53 -0500 (CDT)


On Mon, 25 May 1998, Herbert Wengatz 2850 wrote:

> Richard Gooch wrote:
> +> root@terrorist.math.ntu.edu.tw writes:
> +> >
> +> > I had this e-mail exchange with a vendor in a hardware newsgroup-- but
> +> > it was a group about ASUS motherboards, not CPUs or linux. Since this
> +> > sounded far too good, I am wondering if anyone can confirm or deny the
> +> > numbers here [`me' is myself speaking, `him' is Rick Lindsay, a vendor
> +> > of decent reputation on the net].
> +> >
> +> > him1: Complete Linux kernel compile times:
> +> > him1: Dual P2-300, 64mb SDRAM, 75 seconds
> +> > him1: Dual PPro166/512, 64mb EDO, 45 seconds
> +>
> +> I have trouble believing this. I have a dual PPro180/256 system (Tyan
> +> Titan Pro) with 128 MBytes RAM, and it takes me a few minutes to
> +> compile a kernel. And I do:
> +>
> +> % make MAKE="make -j 3"
> +>
> +> to make sure my CPUs aren't idle. Granted I have smaller L2 cache, but
> +> I don't believe that will change the time by more than 20% or
> +> 30%. Certainly not several times faster!
> +>
> +> Regards,
> +>
> +> Richard....
>
> I have trouble believing this, also. I myself own a dual PPro Board with
> two 180 MHz CPUs overclocked to 233 MHz with 128 MB RAM (60ns EDO) and
> I reach a compiletime of about 2 Minutes 30 seconds or so with a
>
> make -j (To have the make start the machine as many processes as possible
> at the same time. The overall compiletime seems not to differ
> much from a "make -j 3" on my machine. I guess the amount of RAM
> has a large influence here.)
>
> What in fact may be a major improvement to the compiletime is the cachesize.
> My PPros have "only" 256 Kb each; the above mentioned system seems to have
> double the amount - but it still seems to be somewhat extremely short to me.
>
> Regards,
> Herbert

I think this is apples and oranges. I have a *quad* pentium pro machine
and it takes 3 minutes exactly to build a complete 2.1.103 kernel as I
have it configured here, using make -j (with 512mb there is no paging
going on).

Either he is compiling a simple kernel with everything excluded, or he
is getting the times incorrectly...

IMHO of course..

> ________________________________________________________________________
> Herbert Wengatz, ConSol * GmbH | Private email: hwe@muc.de.NOSPAM
> Job: Herbert.Wengatz@ConSol.DE.NOSPAM | "Excellence is a moving target."
> Remove the ".NOSPAM" if you want to email me.
>

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