Hi all!

I just upgraded from ascii to beowulf a pretty decent laptop, equipped
with a core i7 and 8GB of RAM.

I upgraded everything in place: so same desktop environment, same
applications, same hard disk... just "apt-get dist-upgrade" essentially.

I even kept gcc6 because I had it before and I need it.

My test case is compiling ArcticFox, thus something in the realm of
Firefox: lots of compiler activity, make, disk access, make and python.
But, of course, predominant factor is compilation and linking.

With ascii, I was consistently (= not just one build) doing a clean
build in about 31 minutes! Quite fast for this small beast and I was happy.

With beowulf, this number is consistently about 41 minutes.

I say this is a very significant slowdown! Can I gain some speed back?
Some setting? some spectre/meltdown mitigation? Having latest ascii, I
think I had at least some of the backports.


I am wary thus updating to beowulf on slower machines.

Any ideas?


Riccardo