Gentoo Stages Update

Hi All,

Many of you probably know that I am building up weekly Gentoo stages for x86, i686, athlon-xp, amd64, core64 and core32 that can be downloaded at http://www.funtoo.org/linux. Here's an update:

1) For the x86-based stages (x86, i686, athlon-xp,) I had been using a 2007.1 profile which I presumed was going to be used for the upcoming 2007.1 release. It looks like it has been removed from Portage, so I am building using the existing 2007.0 profile. If you are using one of these x86-based stages on your system, you'll find that your /etc/make.profile symlink will no longer point to an active directory. To fix this, you can do one of two things - either go back to the 2007.0 profile or move forward to the 2008.0 profile. Here's how to switch to the 2007.0 profile:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0

The switch to the 2007.0 profile appears to be safe and does not force any downgrades of any key parts of Gentoo (ie. glibc, gcc.)

To use the 2008.0 (currently beta) profile, type:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default/x86/2008.0 /etc/make.profile

I don't see any major upgrades in 2008.0 beta currently (glibc, gcc) so you should be safe for now - however, package selections of key system components may change at the sole discretion of the Gentoo release engineering team, and could introduce unwanted upgrades on production boxes. So I recommend using the 2007.0 profile on servers but 2008.0 could be a good option for people who are wanting to follow 2008.0 development.

2) You'll notice that I'm building two new sub-architectures - core32 and core64. Right now, consider these experimental. They should work just as well as my other builds, but what's experimental about them is that I don't know if the optimization flags will actually be useful to anyone. Let me explain...

The intention of the "core32" sub-architecture builds that I created is to have a 32-bit build that is optimized for Intel's Core architecture, and the intention of the "core64" architecture is to have a 64-bit build that is optimized for Intel's Core 2 and 64-bit Xeon architecture. However, core32 is currently built using -march=prescott, and core64 is currently built using -march=nocona. These are both Intel NetBurst architecture gcc optimizations, not Intel Core architecture optimizations, so we don't know if they will actually run faster than the "i686" build on Intel Core-based processors, in fact it is likely that they will not :( . They probably will do better on Prescott and Nocona architecture (late Pentium 4 NetBurst architecture) systems, so they may get renamed to sub-architectures "prescott" and "nocona" in the near future. (I was hoping to find better names for these builds, because "prescott" and "nocona" mean nothing to people who aren't Intel Processor geeks.) But at least the core32 and core64 builds will allow the community to start playing with them to see how they perform.

Upcoming versions of gcc will allow us to have true optimized builds for the Intel Core series of processors. Until then, we wait...