Proposal to enable frame pointers in ArchLinux by default

gitlab.archlinux.org

18 points·Levitating··4 comments

You don't need profiling 99.99999% of the time. Why ever have it turned by default? Most users will never need profiling turned on.

Imho any non-zero performance cost to solve a near-zero use case is totally unacceptable. Just consider the aggregate cost of all arch Linux machines using 5-10% more energy to accomplish the same work.

Profiling builds should be available and should be easily swapped out with pacman, but there's no compelling reason to make it default for everyone when almost no users will use it.

It's a fair argument. Realistically it could cost about 1-2% of performance.

Though ArchLinux is a tinkerer's distro, the same cannot be said for Ubuntu/Fedora.

I personally think this would benefit me more than it would hurt.

Besides if you're really looking for performance, you want packages compiled for `x86-64-v3`. CachyOS has those: https://wiki.cachyos.org/cachyos_repositories/what_is_the_ca...

Maybe some day we will have x86-64-v3 repo's in ArchLinux.

My core thing is that the OS should by default be tailored to give a good experience for the most common user. The vast overwhelming majority of users will never need profiling, and should not pay the cost.

As a developer myself, I find it totally reasonable and expected that I need to spend time and effort configuring my system to be a development environment. I'm doing something unusual and it requires extra tools. My grandma does not need a development environment.

Even on arch Linux, the number of developers relative to the number of normal users has to be vanishingly small. Optimizing for the rarest of rare use cases doesn't seem like a great choice to me.

The fedora proposal this is based on.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/fno-omit-frame-pointe...

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