Re: RFC: pentium optimized debian
On Sat, Jul 25, 1998 at 04:33:11PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote:
>
> I'd really like to know if the pentium optimizations do help these
> processors. If so, 585 is the way to go I think. But egcs must call it
> -mpentium, not -m585, for a reason..
>
For povray (a CPU bound package) I released once using pentium compile
flags. The speedup was small but noticeable (around 5%) on a Cyrix/133,
similar for Pentium and PII chips. I haven't bothered with it in subsequent
uploads because it interfered with autocompiling. Unsupported flags cause
gcc to abort. I had assumed they would be ignored.
It might be convenient to write a gtk-config -like script that outputs
"optimal" compile flags for the current architecture. This script could
then be called during the build to set flags without crashing the
autocompilers.
Even better would be if all compilers had this built in at one of the
higher -O levels. Irix uses -Ofast to compile with the "best" (according to
the front-end authors' opinions) flags for the current architecture.
Perhaps once enough information on various processors is available a patch
could be sent upstream.
For interactive programs (most of Debian's), it would probably be best to
optimize for minimal code size (to reduce swap-in times), not best run
times. I suspect we're already doing this with the default -O2 flag.
--
Dr. Drake Diedrich, Research Officer - Computing, (02)6279-8302
John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University 0200
Replies to other than Drake.Diedrich@anu.edu.au will be routed off-planet
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