i have a performance question. If I have binaries of an application built on red hat linux, and if I want to run the application on suse, will I be improving the performance if i build it on suse linux to run it on suse?

Will native builds actually help performance on the specific platform? Or will binaries built on any flavour of linux run just as efficiently on any flavour?

-nikhil.

The efficiency should have zero to do with the distribution. However, it has plenty to do with architecture. If you have a binary built for x86 and a binary built for Pentium 4, then a Pentium 4 will run the second binary faster. How much faster depends on your application. For high-end graphical or math programs, it will be a substantial increase.

just curious..

if i have a binary built on amd .. how does it run on x86 or itanium anyway? isnt the machine instructions different?

There's an instruction set known as x86, which started with 386. All x86 processors support this instruction set, but many also have extensions to these.

For example, the Pentium 4 has the SSE and SSE2 floating point instruction sets.

All of the following are "x86" processors:

386
486
Pentium
Pentium Pro
Pentium II
Pentium III
Pentium IIII
Intel Xeon
AMD Athlon
AMD Duron
Celeron
Via C3

There are others, of course, but that should give you an idea.

Itanium 2 uses a completely different instruction set, from what I understand.

x86_64 (aka, AMD 64) supports both the x86 instruction set and an extended 64 bit set.