Gentoo, GCC 4.1.1, and VPSLink2

[jcsix]

Originally Posted by scotty

When I tried to emerge glibc-2.4 a warning message printed out saying NPTL-only requires kernel >= 2.6.9.

That was an arbitrary decision the toolchain devs made to allow them to slim down glibc. Pre-2.6.9 kernel NPTL is still perfectly functional, and VPSLink users who are still on a 2.6.8 kernel can just add the following to /etc/make.conf before building glibc:

NPTL_KERNEL_VERSION="2.6.8"

My server seems to be hosted on a 2.6.9 kernel (egils) so this hasn't affected me.

See this for more info:
http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=123349

[aero]

Originally Posted by jcsix

NPTL_KERNEL_VERSION="2.6.8"

My server seems to be hosted on a 2.6.9 kernel (egils) so this hasn't affected me.

Incidentally, the kernel might really be 2.6.8 (latest openvz stable), but the guest kernel version was fudge to avoid a version detection in the fedora template, as mentioned in a forum post a few months back.

cheers for the NPTL_KERNEL_VERSION tip though.

[scotty]

Thanks for tip.

I'll give that a try later. If anyone on bass feels slow tonight it is because I am recompiling glibc

[rek2]

anyone have packages already made for VPSlink2?
I just pucharse and got the base stage3 on it.. so now will be the best time to do this before I download more software..
Thank.s

[teilo]

I can confirm that GCC 4.1.1 will not compile on a Link3. Same out of memory issues that were reported in the FP. I built a binary package for it (-march=pentium4) on one of my dedicated servers. That worked fine.

[jcsix]

Originally Posted by teilo

I can confirm that GCC 4.1.1 will not compile on a Link3. Same out of memory issues that were reported in the FP. I built a binary package for it (-march=pentium4) on one of my dedicated servers. That worked fine.

I strongly caution against using -march here. If VPSLink ever migrates your virtual server to a physical server with different arch optimizations (opteron for example), it's possible that GCC will generate broken code and that can bite you in myriad ugly ways. I recommend using -mtune=pentium4 instead. This will give you similar optimizations but it won't tie GCC to that arch and will gracefully fall back to unoptimized i386 compilation if those optimizations aren't available.

This obviously costs a little in performance compared to -march, but that's better than facing significant downtime to re-compile everything installed on your server.

[dbrobert]

I tried to build GCC 4.1.1 on Link2 and Link3 with no luck. But I have a working binary package (USE="nls") for anyone who is interested.
-dr

[valenfor]

Just curios but since you can use swap with a Xen installation, does anyone think it would be possible to build 4.X with a Xen based install using Swap? Or is it a no go either way?

Was getting ready to move some services actually downgrading from a L4 to a L3 with Gentoo - the L4 has Host In a Box, but would prefer to use a customized Gentoo (what I run on my local machines).

However what a inconvenience not being able to upgrade the build tools

[DanL@VPSLink]

Please check your private messages, valenfor - we would be happy to give you a chance to test out a Gentoo deployment on a Link-3 before committing to your planned downgrade.

[Cybertronic]

Have you tried adding this to your CFLAGS to compile GCC?
--param ggc-min-expand=0 --param ggc-min-heapsize=8192