State of the distribution: Speed

[JF Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

One of the things who are keeping people out of Linux is relative
dearth of games.  Games require speed so making Independence as fast
as possible, specially in the area of graphics, is an important goal
for Indy.

In order to improve speed

-XFree and the kernel are compiled with gcc-29% who gives a 10%
performance increase on integer operations and a 25% on floating point
ones.  If I have time (or someone volunters) it will also have a
recompile glibc who is probably more important for performance than
the kernel.  We cannot presently just recompile anything

-Powertweak who allows to optimize the chipset features thus increasing
disk bandwidth

-The SDL and ClanLib game libraries are compiled with MMX optimizations.

-Cobra nearly doubles the performance of most cards

-We are considering a GLX enhanced Mesa as soon as it matures enough:
it would make XFree fast enough to play the same kind of games people
play on Windows notably the First Gear flight simulator.

We have left out some optimizations (notably dangerous compiler parms
when compiling the kernel) because Indy's spirit is providing speed to
the user in order he can play games not to win a computer race against
his neighbour at the cost of having an intersting life full of bugs.

-- 
			Jean Francois Martinez

Project Independence: Linux for the Masses
http://www.independence.seul.org