Jakub's Recommendations for ia32 Support

[Pekka Pietikainen]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 12:11:59PM -0500, Warren Togami wrote:
> Jakub recommended doing comparison tests of -m32 -march=i586
> -mtune=generic vs. -m32 -march=i686 -mtune=generic with Spec2k and
> Spec2006 benchmark tools.  Anyone interested in trying this?
>
> In related news, cebbert wants to do the following to the F-11 kernel:
> - Eliminate the current i686 kernel.
> - i686 hardware would get i686 PAE by default.
> - i586 kernel becomes i686, except without cmov.  This is primarily so
> people don't complain when they realize they have the "i586" kernel.
Just a note, I believe that the ia32 support should "concentrate" on 
netbooks (So Intel Atom), those are the only new things on the market 
that can't run x86_64, and the userbase of those will just grow and 
every percent of extra performance will make many people happy.

A benchmark run on one of those might be very useful to make the final
decision, not that the more server-oriented tests are very useful for the
typical netbook userbase.

And then there's the "should work even with this" decision, and i686 without
cmov is a reasonable minimum there. Could be i686+cmov or +sse2, but those
will make a lot of people unhappy.

-- 
Pekka Pietikainen