RFC: Optimizing for 386
Nick Bargnesi
nbargnesi at gmail.com
Wed Jan 19 16:27:12 UTC 2005
On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:08:22 -0600, Joseph D. Wagner
<technojoecoolusa at charter.net> wrote:
> I can count the total number of people in the world who still use a 386 on the fingers of both of my hands. Why are we still catering to this small group of people?
>
> With the exception of the kernel and glibc, all RPM's are optimized for 386 architecture.
Acckk! All RPM's are optimized for i386? But I'm running x86_64!
Who let 3 out of the cage with this showstopper? Where's the errata?
:)
This is a waste of system resources. Study after study shows that you
can achieve a 10% - 40% performance improvement my optimizing code for
a specific architecture. Windows XP may only be optimized for a
Pentium, but by golly, at least the whole thing is optimized, not just
the kernel and the C library.
>
> Just look at X. Is anyone seriously trying to get X to run on a 386? I can understand compiling the text-based programs, like bash, for 386. You can run a text-only box on a 386 just fine. Why do that for X? Why do that for GNOME, KDE, or any graphical program for that matter?
>
> I know that I can recompile of these program from the source code to achieve those optimizations. However, why should everyone who wants to optimize their systems have to go through that, just so a handful of people with 386 machines can run X out-of-the-box? Then, we have recompile all over again with the next RPM release.
>
> Why can't the few people who have a 386 be made to recompile X from sources to get it to run on there machines, so the rest of us can enjoy the performance boost from running optimized binaries?
>
> I think we seriously need to rethink the distribution strategy. At the very least, all graphical programs should be optimized for i686.
>
> Joseph D. Wagner
>
> --
> fedora-devel-list mailing list
> fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
> http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
>
--
Nick Bargnesi
http://www.den-4.com
Den 4 Software
pub 1024D/E8BD2FD0 2004-12-02 Nick Bargnesi <nbargnesi at gmail.com>
Key fingerprint = 6F9D 9404 63CD 2B04 DE7A 0F9D A1ED C1B0 E8BD 2FD0
sub 2048g/56C5D45B 2004-12-02
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
More information about the devel
mailing list