[CLUE-Tech] Gentoo build questions

[Nate Duehr]

Well sports fans,

I've spent about a week trying to figure out how to Stage I a Via 
C3-based mini-itx board.  Keep running across little issues, but slowly 
working them out.

They're all related to my choice to use ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" even 
during the bootstrap.

My question for the Gentoo fans is... do you find that "~86" is pretty 
stable, unstable, or ...?

I understand it's *supposed* to be somewhat unstable, but the types of 
things I'm running across are really childish... like the build scripts 
for stuff in "emerge system" calling autoconf 1.8 directly instead of 
just "autoconf", so they break unless you emerge autoconf 1.8 
specifically into the system first.

Some of the comments on forums.gentoo.org are complaining that this is 
becoming far too common in Gentoo releases.  Any thoughts on that?

Just some discussion-fodder.

Next, does anyone know the proper -march settings for a Via C3 CPU?  I 
have found via Google searching about three answers to that question so 
far, and right now I'm using '-mcpu=i686' which has the following two 
problems:

- It's deprecated and whines loudly about it.

- Certain libs will probably fail on the Via C3.  Turns out from other 
Google searching that some lib in glibc has some raw ASM in it that 
includes the "cmov" command, which is OPTIONAL on i686 according to 
Intel (but is in all of their 686 processors) and I haven't seen any 
patches for glibc to fix it yet... still waiting for the lib to fail 
somewhere in the bootstrap process so I know which one it is... or 
perhaps it's "just fixed" by now... especially in "~x86". 

So the Via is a true standards-compliant i686 processor, but the 
compiler didn't follow the rules.  Sigh.  Oh well, that one will work 
itself out.

Finally -- I've seen a few sites that recommend using "-Os" to optimize 
for size on this processor, but I really don't understand the purpose.  
Any compiler gurus want to tackle that one?  I'm just curious is all.

So far, now that I've "sussed out the problems" as one of my Aussie 
friends would say, the emerge's are going well now.  I'm ultimately 
planning on playing with Asterisk on this box...

Thanks all,

--
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com