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Finally, a way to use the loads of RAM I have other than Compiling and Blendering.
Well, I guess we also have RAM drives
Just reconfigured /etc/makepkg.conf to use extra cores and tmpfs.. I've been compiling on the SSD with one core for so long it's embarrassing.
While you're still in your makepkg.conf, don't forget to set march=native (and remove mtune) in your CFLAGS! (unless you're sharing your compiled packages with other systems)
Where's the difference between march=native and march=x86-64 in that case?
A ton of difference! march stands for microarchitecture levels (or feature levels). "x86-64" is the baseline feature set targeting common x86_64 instructions found in early 64-bit CPUs, circa 2003. Since 2003 obviously there have been several advancements in CPUs and the x86_64 arch, and these have been further classified as:
So if you're still on x86-64, you're missing out on some decent performance gains by not making use of all the newer instructions/optimisations made in the past two decades(!).
If you're on a recent CPU (2017+), ideally you'd want to be on at least x86-64-v3 (v4 has seemingly negligible gains, at least on Intel). There's also CPU-family specific marches such as znver4 for AMD Zen 4 CPUs, which would be an even better choice than x86-64-v4.
But the best march you want use is of course native - this makes available all instructions and compiler optimisations that's specific to your particular CPU, for the best performance you can possibly get. The disadvantage of native is that any binaries compiled with this can run only on your CPU (or a very similar one) - but that's only an issue for those who need to distribute binaries (like software developers), or if you're sharing your pkg cache with other machines.
Since the flags defined in makepkg.conf only affect AUR/manual source builds (and not the default core/extra packages), I'd recommend also reinstalling all your main packages from either the ALHP or CachyOS repos, in order to completely switch over to x86-64-v3 / v4.
Further reading on microarchitectures:
Benchmarks:
cc: @luthis@lemmy.nz
Can I also compile a list of selected packages from the repositories fresh easily? E.g. Firefox? Or do I have to download their PKGBUILD to makepkg?
The repositories already contain pre-compiled packages. To install them, just add the repository before the Arch repos, and then simply reinstall the packages to install their optimised versions.
How can I trust them? At least with Arch there's the "many eyes" principle.
Both CachyOS and ALHP are reasonably popular
never heard of them. I need to research a bit more until I activate what is basically another "dangerous" non-maintainer repository. Thank you a lot for your links and explanations!
thanks for reminding me. Didn't activate this on my new install since I got 64G of RAM :)
systemctl --user enable psd-resync.service
I think this is not needed since psd.service has the following in it:
[Unit]
…
Wants=psd-resync.service
Btw the private browsing mode is also RAM-only which is a hard requirement for the Tor browser ("no disk policy")