Looking around a bit I didn't find any clear statement regarding what the CPU archtecture of my linode (host28) is. My guess would be pentium4, but is that right? (UML dmesg and /proc/cpuinfo aren't very informative in this regard...)

The CFLAGS wasn't set for the Gentoo distro I just installed, which is of course what I'm going to use this info for...

Hello,

If you have a look at the products page:

http://www.linode.com/products/linodes.cfm

Near "Max CPU": "Dual 2.66 GHz Xeon"

-Chris

Ahh... Right! I've seen that info before, just didn't think about it this time around...

Many thanks!

To avoid the issue altogether, I'd recommend setting the following in the Gentoo /etc/make.conf file in the image(s):

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -fstack-protector -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

(Think the last one is needed if you override the CFLAGS.)

Be careful with --march=pentium4 or --mcpu=pentium4. As make.conf warns, pentium4 may sometimes generate invalid MMX2 instructions - using pentium3 is safer.

Thanks for the warning about pentium4. I wasn't aware of it since I've been absent from the Gentoo world for about half a year.

Anyway, did some research on the topic and it seems the problems were resolved as of gcc 3.2.3 as noted here and in the GCC changelog. Not quite sure it is the same issue though, so I'll keep my eyes open for segfaults in the future (although I've seen none of them at home after several weeks on pentium4 optimized binaries). Also, I only found the note you mentioned in the make.conf at Linode, not in my recent home installation. It is no longer present in the make.conf in CVS either.

All in all, I think we are safe from this nowadays, but thanks anyways.