Even though the processor has been specified as athlon-xp in my /etc/make.config file when I try to emerge either memtest86 or memtest86+ portage starts building with the generic 486 optimizations. I downloaded the sources for both programs and manually changed the optimizations to athlon-xp and they compile just fine so the fault is in the ebuilds. The sources do not ship with a config file and you have to manually change the optimizations in the make file and this is why the generic ebuild probably didn't work. However, using the generic/default setup that comes with the release goes agains all the principles behind USE flags so this bug should be fixed. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
The only principle in this case is safety. There are a quite a number of packages, which forbid you to optimize.