Kudos to everyone who worked on the gcc-4.2 merge

[Garrett Cooper]

Garrett Cooper wrote:
> Joao Barros wrote:
>> On 6/4/07, Alexander Kabaev <kabaev at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, 3 Jun 2007 17:30:15 -0700 (PDT)
>>> youshi10 at u.washington.edu wrote:
>>>
>>> > I just wanted to thank everyone who helped make the gcc 4.2 merge
>>> > possible -- I can see a noticeable performance increase (1.5x ~ 2.0x
>>> > load time decrease) in my server (P4 HTT with SMP).
>>> >
>>> > This will be one of the great changes that will put FreeBSD back on
>>> > the map closer to many Linux distros.
>>> >
>>> > Once gcc 4.2.1 gets in the tree, things will be much better, I'm
>>> > sure :).
>>> >
>>> > Thank you very much, and let me know if you need testing with gcc
>>> > 4.2.1 when it rolls around ;).
>>> >
>>> > -Garrett
>>> >
>>> Thanks, but I think kudos are addressed to wrong people. I very much
>>> doubt that GCC can be responsible for any, let alone dramatic,
>>> performance differences. Most likely you see effects of hard work done
>>> by SMP scalability guys.
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Alexander Kabaev
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I emailed Garrett but forgot to cc current@
>>
>> My question was: "Can you specify the workload that you verify that
>> much improvement?"
>> Like you I had my doubts gcc was responsible for such an improvement.
>>
>>
> The differences I saw (ok, limited), were a decrease in bootup time 
> (about 15-30 seconds faster), login via ssh (almost instantaneous when 
> the sshd thread seemingly hasn't gone to sleep), restarting the samba 
> daemon (3 seconds to ~1 second), and running make buildworld and 
> installworld.
>
> The only thing that I've noticed so far is that acpi is broken 
> again... I was shocked when I hit my power button and my machine 
> instantly shut off 0_0...
>
> Synced to HEAD yesterday and rebuilt.
>
> ASUS P4800DX motherboard with a P4 3.0GHz Northwood chip.
>
> -Garrett
3 other things I forgot to mention:

1. I don't use WITNESS on my server.
2. I use the 4BSD scheduler, not the ULE scheduler.
3. The last time I synced and built everything was around early May if I 
remember correctly.

-Garrett