Re: Gentoo Alpha questions

On Fri, 5 Mar 2004 10:35:34 -0500
"Donsbach, Jeff" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> Jean-Sebatien,
> 
> I too have an XL-366 and just recently went through the Gentoo
> install. It was not all the difficult. If you are already running a
> 2.4 kernel, it will be pretty easy. That was my biggest hurdle in that
> I has still been running on old 2.2.19 kernel.
> 
> Yes, you can custom build things for your machine type (ev56). I have
> already noticed that it does seem a bit snappier than before. I had
> been running Red Hat 6.2 (ancient I know). How I went about it is I
> basically installed the system stuff (/, /usr, /var ) to an unused
> partition. Then I followed the instructions on the gentoo site for
> "Installing from a running system". Basically, you start by untarring
> one of the "stages" (I started with Stage 1) to your new partition and
> then doing a "chroot" to that from the running system. Then you kick
> off the bootstrap process. Starting from Stage 1, I think my system
> ran almost all night building things. The process would probably be
> faster if you started from a higher stage or tried an install from the
> LiveCD (a new image for that was offered up last week by Jay Maynard).
> 
> As for Perl performance, I haven't done enough Perl work to say
> whether the performance difference in using a "-mcpu ev56" build flag
> is noticeable or not.

Forget it. If you want a real performance boost with perl you should try
to compile it with ccc. Good luck and a lot of fun:-)

> 
> Apache 2 installs without a hitch. I did have a problem building Samba

Hehe, yes installs without a hitch but...I had a runtime problem with
the db module in apache (sdbm?). It was miscompiled with optimisation
enabled. I know that since a long time, but it was undergone. I will
post a patch for that.

> last week though, which I haven't had time to chase down yet. I'm
> getting some duplicate/conflicting symbol definitions in two header
> files.
> 
> One thing I did notice is that the "vanilla-sources" kernel source
> tree does not seem to obey the Portage build flags for machine type
> that I had set. It still built an "ev5" kernel even though I had set
> "-mcpu ev56" build flags for Portage. I looked at it a little bit and
> it looked like a few tweaks to the kernel source Makefiles would fix
> that problem. It may already be fixed in one of the other kernel trees
> (alpha-sources and/or compaq-sources for instance). I didn't look
> however.

That's totally right, because the CFLAGS in portage has nothing to do
with the CFLAGS in the kernel tree. So if you wish to compile with ev56
then you should select the right processor-variant in .config .
Are you sure that you have an ev56? XL-366 doesn't sound like an ev56:-)
but I may be wrong since I haven't looked up.

> 
> I have also installed the sshd daemon and that works fine too. I have
> not tied fetchmail, or SpamAssassin yet. However, I "force built" Zope
> 2.6.4 (it was not marked to build on alpha in the Portage tree) and so
> far that too seems to be working too.

Last week I installed zope too. I will fill a bugreport so that Aron
mark it stable. Ok?!

greets

Marc

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