Re: Debian on a 386? Unlikely. (was: ramblings about old hardware, gzip, bz2, and pentium opts)
Ben Armstrong writes:
> On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Franklin Belew wrote:
> > My main concern is that the optimizations are going to be too intel centric
> > I know for a fact that if you compile a program with -mpentium-pro
> > it faults in nasty ways on an AMD k6. Are you proposing that
> > Intel P2, Celeron, and PIII are the only worthwhile propcessors, or just that
> > anyone besides Intel is unimportant?
>
> I certainly didn't mean to limit the approach to specific processors.
> It seems the limiting factors are:
>
> 1. alternate processors would need to have binaries automatically
> built for them in a trouble-free (or low-maintenance) way
> - if this is not acheivable, it is not worthwhile, and we
> should stick with 386 as the lowest common denominator
one interesting alternative would be to use fat binaries. This worked
very well for Openstep 4.x (by NeXT). The modifications to binutils
and gcc are available from Apple, but someone would need to integrate
them upstream ... I didn't look how much of this is already used in
the Darwin project.
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