SUSE 8.2 Reviewed

[coltrane]

...and ordered by the 'trane


Linkage : http://www.madpenguin.org/article.ph...ad&order=0

Good interview, but next time skip the part where you tell your life' story

How's the stability, since SuSE uses a pre release GCC as it's base - and this one is known to have several problems, mostly in the optimization paths so I'm guessing SuSE users won't notice but can you compile something working at -O2 -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -mmmx -m3dnow -msse (pretty basic optimizations which I used to build my entire gentoo system and it works beautifully on a similar machine to the testbed one used in the review)

Would you try compiling say kdelibs and kdebase with those optimizations and giving me the result - those packages are good stresstests for GCC since it's huge and complicated.

[Tyr_7BE]

Yeah as cool as using pre-release software is, you gotta do a good job fixing it up. RH8 did an alright job on the XServer...let's hope SuSE can do the same with GCC.

[coltrane]

Wont get it until next month...pre-order

[demian]

Just ordered it. It'll ship tomorrow

[coltrane]

Its on its way

hehe... SuSE seem to have gone RedHat on the GCC thing, GCC3.3 still generates wrong code for switch statements - the jump tables are all messed up.

Also it can't optimize memcpy correctly, and -O2 (which every distro ships binaries compiled with I think) is known to break in some quite common cases.

I would REALLY like to see how it runs, because it certainly doesn't sound nice.

[coltrane]

[quote author=Lovechild link=board=7;threadid=6702;start=0#63863 date=1050416046]
hehe... SuSE seem to have gone RedHat on the GCC thing, GCC3.3 still generates wrong code for switch statements - the jump tables are all messed up.

Also it can't optimize memcpy correctly, and -O2 (which every distro ships binaries compiled with I think) is known to break in some quite common cases.

I would REALLY like to see how it runs, because it certainly doesn't sound nice.
[/quote]

I take it you dont share my enthusiasm....

I doubt they would have released a completely unstable OS, I mean they are not Microsoft after all... but building the darn thing on a CVS snapshot of GCC, it just seems like a strange decision to me.

But if it works, then it's all good, also seeing has the majority of these GCC bugs generate wrong code, there's a good chance the SuSE engineers just worked around it by rewriting parts of that code to get a working release, or altering GCC flags. The problem is can it compile software which is otherwise fine - the GCC guys tell me that 3.3 right now is "fine" but has a few hickups - like the switch thing... also lots of bugs will be pushed untill 3.3.1 or 3.4 because they are minor or none trivial(meaning lots of work).

On the other hand 3.2.3 is set to be released any time now, and the changelog looks impressive, it will probably be the last 3.2 release and development will the focus on 3.3 / 3.4 - the good news is that 3.4 looks to kick major ass, it wipes floor with most compilers out there.

whatever happens, rock on SuSE, keep my homeboy Jens Axboe busy with that BIO stuff.

LC ... with reference to stable releases....windows is not the only OS that releases unstable. I have used unstable linux releases too. Mandrake had lots of unstability between 7.2 and 8.1 before i left, Libranet had instabilities, Debian had them too though they were very very scarce in Debian, Gentoo had lots and lots (yes i have to say this because even if some of the instabilities that faced me were my fault or my hardware's fault there were alot of other instabilities too), and arch linux has its instabilities and bugs as well. That is the nature of the beast. humans make mistakes and computers and their oses are human creations.

EDIT: crap i forgot to be a curmudgeon.....suse is evil :P