Compiling for CPU (was Re: Performance testing (pass 1))

[Jesse Keating]

On Friday 26 September 2003 09:42, Rick Johnson wrote:
> Not to pit distros, but Mandrake compiles for i586 by default, though
> they don't really give out any i686 or athlon specific packages (last
> I checked). Given that Red Hat's minimum specd hardware is a Pentium
> class machine with 64MB for text, and a PII 400 with 128MB more more
> for GUI use, what would we have to lose by changing the default to
> compile as march=i586 and mcpu=i686, or providing i686 versions of
> core components of XFree86? I'm sure it "throws out" the few who like
> to build the distro for 386 and 486 machines, but I feel the majority
> would benefit and the minority could simply rebuild the SRPMs for
> i386 for their specific application (would be a handful of packages
> at best since those types of machiens probably wouldn't be running
> full-blown Gnome or KDE desktops, but perhaps browser kiosks at best.

This has been hashed many times, specifically on the severn list.  BTW, 
compiling for i586, while not using i586 processors, will actually hurt 
more than help.  i586 optimized software will run WORSE on i686 
platforms than i386 optimized software will.  It has to do w/ the 
differences of the i586 platform.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE MCSE
http://geek.j2solutions.net
Mondo DevTeam (http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/)

Was I helpful?  Let others know:
 http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating