I remember spending a lot of time with that as a teenager. A stage0 (or was it stage1?) installation took about a weekend, I recall. I was a bit surprised recently realizing that there's still a significant Gentoo community, with influx of new users. Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense.

Might give it a try again.

> Didn't really occur to me that the installation experience is completely different these days, but that makes sense.

I used Gentoo as my main OS for multiple years over a decade ago, installed it a couple of times, and helped with the localization of several documents, but I still remember the installation being basically the same as it is now.

I’m honestly wondering what is meant by this statement?

In the past you used to be able to choose from various stages, which went down to _very low_ level. Now you must start from stage 3, which is already a (slim, but) fully bootstrapped/running installation, which you customize from there.

It might have a lot to do with the high profile nature of gentoo on the /g/ board on 4chan. There are a lot of people still on the gentootrain.

I had this same thought. I had to print out the install guides because I had no WiFi at the time.

I failed at the chroot process at one point and ended up nuking a whole install.

I learned so much then though that has paid off in my career. Good times.

This was pretty much my experience exactly... I was dual booting, though, so also had a lot of downloaded docs that I could read on the other drive partition... And then reboot to go back to trying to get things running on the gentoo side. And inevitably have to wait to go into the university computer labs on Monday to look for answers in the forums.

Incidentally, I had actually picked gentoo because the forums looked fantastic... My first linux attempt was with suse, but all the "interesting" answers were in German. So next time I tried the one with the liveliest forums. Turns out the forums were lively for a some of the wrong reasons (everything was hard), but the people were the right combination of friendly and incredibly helpful and knowledgeable. I learned a huge amount from the process and the people. Though, indeed, the whole from source distro thing was foolish, in retrospect.

Gentoo will forever be my "uphill through the snow both ways" story.

Before I learned enough to understand the compile-from-source performance myth, I once put Gentoo on an old 966MHz Coppermine box I had lying around.

I didn't have cross-compiling set up yet, and I unwisely decided to install X. And Gnome. And Open Office.

It compiled for days.

Not necessarily a myth anymore, strangely. If you apt/rpm install something nowadays, it probably wasn't built with support for newer CPU instructions (AVX, AES-NI, sometimes even SSE4). -march=native is gonna have a much bigger effect now than stage 1 Gentoo installs did in the mid-2000s.

(and, yes, I do remember waiting a full day for KDE to compile)

https://web.archive.org/web/20080704112619/http://funroll-lo...

> -march=native is gonna have a much bigger effect now than stage 1 Gentoo installs did in the mid-2000s.

Actually, probably quite the contrary. All x86-64 chips are required to support SSE2, which lets you use SSE for floating-point instead of x87 floating-point, which is a big speed win. But the newer extensions are specialized SSE instructions, which generally require manual use of instructions to utilize; specialized crypto instructions, which definitely require manual use; and AVX instructions, which doubles the width of vectors you can use. The first two is not going to be improved with -march; the code that uses it is almost certainly going to be compiled in a way that lets it dynamically use these instructions when available.

As for vectorized code that could use AVX instead, it's dubious how much of an effect it would have, since the biggest improvement in vectorization will be enabled with the 128-bit vectors, with 256-bit vectors offering at most a 2x speedup in the vectorized code, the effect being reduced by some code only being 128-bit-vectorizable (and not receiving any speedup), and also by Amdahl's Law reducing the benefit of further speedups in that code. Furthermore, vectorization tends to be much less relevant in the "integer" code that is typical of most consumer software, outside of a few hot loops that are already manually specified as above.

Thanks for the more detailed information. I was under the impression that compilers would automatically use SSE3+ and AVX when appropriate.

But what about other SIMD extensions, are really all packages distributed with the expectation that for example SSE5 and similar are supported?

Most of the SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, and SSE4.2 (there is no SSE5 in any released processor) instructions are not particularly feasible to be used by automatic vectorization, being mostly horizontal vector optimizations or some oddball instructions that are pretty task-specific (hi, PCMPESTRI). You might see them come up in SLP vectorization, but my last experience with LLVM's SLP vectorizer is that it does a poor job of taking advantage of these kinds of instructions anyways.

For hot kernels (say, memcpy), it is definitely the case that many projects have implementations of several different varieties of these, and use the version best suited for your current architecture. See https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=tree;f=sysdeps/x86... for the different variants of common functions in glibc.

I remember those days. Learned a lot by doing stage 0 gentoo installs.

I did stage 0 installs a few times. While it took a long time, there was fairly little work on my side. Most of the grunt stuff had been automated.[0] I think the only thing the user had to do was config.

[0] Which is the point of Gentoo, after all. It's what made it a lot better than LFS/BFS. You get everything from source with little effort. 17 years later, I'm still using Gentoo. Nothing like it.

The guide was pretty good as I remember, I ran Gentoo through most of university. It did take a while from a stage1 install though.

We run two servers and one laptop on Gentoo Linux. Other two boxes run Arch Linux. :)

Isn't Slackware still like that?

Nah, Slackware install was pretty fast. Although it did install a ton of packages and removing the extra cruft is a pain in the ass without a decent package manager that handles dependencies.