RFC: Optimizing for 386

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Wed Jan 19 22:11:02 UTC 2005


Once upon a time, Jamie Zawinski <jwz at jwz.org> said:
> Chris Adams wrote:
> > Some other RPMs have code that detects i386 vs. i686 vs. Athlon
> > (really "regular" vs. MMX/SSE/etc.) at runtime and uses the best
> > available.
> 
> Just curious -- which packages are those?  (Besides X and kernel.)

I think some of the video related libraries do, but I don't know which
right off.  A quick check on my system (FC2 still) looks like:

/usr/X11R6/lib/libOSMesa.so.4 checks for MMX, 3DNow!, SSE
/usr/bin/gimp checks for MMX, 3DNow!, SSE
/usr/bin/xmms may use MMX, 3DNow!
/usr/lib/libFLAC.so.4 may use cmov, MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow!
/usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 may use MMX, SSE
/usr/lib/libgstreamer-0.8.so may use MMX, 3DNow!, SSE
/usr/lib/libasound.so.2 may use MMX

Looking at libraries on my system, I also see special versions of some
libraries:

/lib/tls/libdb-4.2.so
/usr/lib/tls/libdb_cxx-4.2.so
/usr/lib/sse2/libgmp.so.3
/usr/lib/sse2/libgmpxx.so.3
/usr/lib/sse2/libmp.so.3

The tls libraries are different because of threading, but that is i686
related.

I also see other things (from freshrpms and such) that are i386 arch but
the library/binary has MMX/SSE/etc. detection code.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.




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