Bad performance on alpha? (make buildworld)

[David O'Brien]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2004 at 07:21:03PM +0100, Oliver Lehmann wrote:
> I run several buildworld's on both, an Alpha EV56 and a Intel PII. I'm
> wondering that the Pentium beats the Alpha. Both systems have INVARIANTS*
> and WITNESS* disabled. Furthermore, no special tweakups - nearly "out of
> the box" configured.

Build the same target arch on both machines.  'buildworld' times across
platforms are never comparable.

    alpha-ev56:/usr/src# time make TARGET_ARCH=sparc64 buildworld
    p-ii:/usr/src# time make TARGET_ARCH=sparc64 buildworld

(pick an target arch other than alpha or i386: ia64, sparc64, powerpc,
amd64 to make sure neither platform has an advantage in the buildworld
steps)

Even this isn't a fair comparison as you've got to build the cross tools
and that will be way different on the two platforms.  So what you really
want to do, is do a full cross-build, and then rebuild only stage4 and
time that.  See /usr/src/Makefile.inc1 to figure out the internal
targets.