Jakub's Recommendations for ia32 Support

[Nicolas Chauvet]

2009/2/3 Pekka Pietikainen <pp at ee.oulu.fi>:
> 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.

Does the right wording for this wouldn't be to move i586 to secondary
architecture and welcome i686 with sse(2?) as the new default x86_32
and primary  arch ?

Having a project to build fews packages targeted as i586 and
eventually using dietlibc for dhcp/dns server usage (other?)  would be
more valuable than having the fast majority of packages compiled with
old options?


Nicolas (kwizart)