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Re: i386 compatibility & libstdc++



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On Tuesday 29 April 2003 21:22, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> That won't help anything. "Compiling without threads" isn't really
> supported on Linux: if threads are not used, this is always a
> link-time/runtime issue, not a compile time issue.

Right, forget what I said about that.

> > Also, if an application or library cares about this sort of
> > micro-optimization, it probably should be provided in an optimized
> > version anyway.
>
> I think the performance loss for applications like KDE will be
> significant. I doubt that providing two versions of KDE (i386
> and i486+) would be feasible.

It would surely be nice to see performance numbers from actual
applications. After all, the applications are normally doing
some things besides low level atomic operations.

When the i386 and the i486 libraries are compatible, we can
decide what to do with each package case-by-case with
these options:

1. not performance critical but important (e.g. apt)
2. won't work on i386 anyway and therefore can be built 
   for i486 (e.g. mozilla or kde)
3. might be used on i386 but is performance critical and
   should be provided for i386 as well as i[56]86 (e.g. libqt3)

Since category 3. will be very small (I could not come up with 
any example besides libqt3 and even that is debatable), 
this should solve the problem.

Nevertheless, I think it would be best to also start a full 
Debian/i686 port which will be 100% compatible with Debian on i386 
except that it only runs on PentiumPro compatible machines,
i.e. Pentium 2/3/4/M, Xeon, Celeron, Athlon, Duron and Opteron 
but not Pentium, K5, K6 and most VIA/cyrix chips.

	Arnd <><
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