Re: What architecture are we?
david@elo.sw.ods.com (David Engel) writes:
> I have always used i486-linux in my packages. However, with 586
> systems pretty much being the standard these days, we should
> probably standardize on i586-linux, except in those cases where the
> resulting package would not run at all on i[34]86 systems. One such
> case would be the Linux kernel which uses some Pentium-only
> instructions when configured for i586.
There are two different issues here.
* The <arch> component in pathnames.
As long as the code still runs on an i386, this should remain `i386'
or `i386-linux'. More generally, the oldest architecture that works.
* Optimization.
It doesn't make much sense to optimize code for i386 when relatively
few people run i386 machines. I'd suspect the most common
architecture is i586 now. In addition, i486-optimized binaries
produced by gcc are somewhat bloated. So, it's probably best to
optimize for the i586 as long as it remains compatible with i386
machines.
--
Daniel Quinlan http://www.pathname.com/~quinlan
quinlan@pathname.com quinlan@transmeta.com (at work)
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