SuSE Project SUPER [Was Re: compilation architecture]

[Linus Walleij]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek wrote:

> I thinked it's compilation question.

There are much more probable things I think, SuSE had project SUPER
http://en.opensuse.org/SUPER

This project was closed in November last year because everything desirable 
had been integrated into OpenSuSE.

It doesn't quite say which things they have integrated in the end sadly, 
but if we ask them they can probably tell us. AFAICS they atleast have 
these (correct me if wrong):

* They use a LOT of preloading, personalized per user with PePr so it
   preloads the stuff you are most likely to use before you use it. Not
   strange if you feel it is noticably faster, especially if you have lots
   of RAM to preload things into.

* They are possibly using and maintaining some of the non-mainlined CK
   patches. (i.e. a kernel responsiveness issue) but looks like they
   actually don't because of lack of support. Swap prefetch is the usual
   suspect key patch here.

* They default to using reiserfs of their disks which may result in
   quicker loads. The mount it noatime,notail. This is QUICK.

* They prelink heavily. (And so do we I think.)

* They have all the same problems with sysvinit as we do.

* Yes and they do use -O3 -march i686 -mtune i686

.. probably more.

We could do all of these in Fedora of course. If they are using that PePr 
thing, it would be interesting to test on Fedora, it looks like a cool 
idea. A rootfs with reiserfs is customizable during install I think, but 
I don't think it'll mount noatime,notail default, but that is easy to test 
too.

Linus