[Sussex] gentoo - pre-install questions

[John D.]

On Friday 19 November 2004 09:26, Geoff Teale wrote:
> John,
>
> One of the biggest criticisms of Gentoo users is they talk a lot about
> cflags (options to the C compiler) and supposed mystical benefits of
> phrases like  -funrolloops  without really understanding what they are
> talking about.

Ah ha, some of the mystery explained :-)

> If you have mcpu or march set to the right architecture and you have -O3
> set then you're getting about as much optomisation and you safely can
> from C compiler as a general rule.  In order to do any better you would
> have to have a lot of knowledge of the source on a per application
> basis.

From memory, the discs for the pentium 4 i686 architecture that I got from 
gentoo, have -O2 set, but from what you say, I think I'll leave that well 
alone.

> If you really want to understand how all of this works you're going to
> have to start learning about C programming.  A noble and worthy goal,
> but a world away from just "using" the OS.

;-)))))

Not gonna happen any time soon then.

regards

John D.