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State of the Distribution: speed

One of the things that keep people away from Linux is its relative dearth of games. Games require speed so making Independence as fast as possible, especially in the area of graphics, is an important goal for Indy.

In order to improve speed:

• XFree and the kernel are compiled with gcc-2.95 which gives a 10% performance increase on integer operations and a 25% on floating point ones. If I have time (or someone volunteers) it will also have a recompile of glibc which is probably more important for performance than the kernel. We cannot presently just recompile anything
• We use Powertweak which allows to optimize the chipset features thus increasing disk bandwidth
• The SDL and ClanLib game libraries are compiled with MMX optimizations.
• We use Cobra which 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 so that he can play games, but not to win a computer race against his neighbour at the cost of having an intersting life full of bugs.

Jean Francois Martinez