cpu feature dependencies? (was: Re: Migration to Pentium?)

[Arthur Korn <arthur@korn.ch>]

Hi

Harald Dunkel schrieb:
> Maybe you have seen the Stampede Linux distribution 
> (http://www.stampede.org/). They promise a speed improvement of 
> 10% - 30% compared to i386 binaries. I would like to get this from
> Debian, too.

I've compared the stock Debian povray with a optimized one
(running a K6-II) in summer, and the speed advantage of the
optimized version was around .2-3% depending on the
characteristics of the world and options to povray.

The cost of maintaining a seperate tree can't be justified by
the usually marginal performance gain.

IMO the way to go is what libc, mpg123 and probably other
packages already do -- provide optimized versions of some
binaries where it _really_ makes a difference (usually because
CPU specific features like vector units are used). It would be
great if this could be handled automatically by apt/dpkg with
some kind of subarchitectures/pseudo-dependencies on processor
features.

(ie
Package: mpg123-3dnow
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.97), mmx, 3dnow
)

ciao, 2ri
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