Hello, I am compiling some benchmarks, and it says that I can try the option gcc-serial instead of only gcc, can anyone please explain the difference between gcc and gcc serial?.
The place where that appears is here and it is mentioned for example in the slide 71. It is mentioned in more places but in none of them say what is gcc-serial.
Thank you.
I've never heard of gcc-serial, and I've used gcc for quite a while. Can you clarify more precisely what your benchmarks are telling you? Maybe you meant "gcc -serial" (with a space after gcc and before -serial)? Even in that, case though, I still don't know, since I can't find any mention of a -serial option in my gcc manual.
One version of gcc I'm using has the -mserialize-volatile and -mno-serialize-volatile options, which enable and disable respectively the generation of code that ensures the sequential consistency of volatile memory accesses.
From the slides, it seems to be a configuration name for the benchmarking tool, not a command you should use. It probably means some special way of using gcc when the tool is used.
The slides refer to a tool from Stanford (PARSEC) meant to benchmark multithreaded shared memory programs -- a.k.a. parallel programs. In many cases, "serial" is the opposite of "parallel":
$ cat config/gcc-serial.bldconf
#!/bin/bash
#
# gcc-serial.bldconf - file containing global information necessary to build
# the serial versions of the PARSEC programs with gcc
#
# Copyright (C) 2006, 2007 Christian Bienia
# Global configuration is identical to multi-threaded version
source ${PARSECDIR}/config/gcc.bldconf