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Re: Migration to Pentium?



On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 08:58:35PM -0800, Andrew Lenharth wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Jan 2001, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > Even if there isn't a generalspeedup, there's software that can be
> > compiled with support for 3Dnow! or MMX and there already packages like
> > libc6-i586 that are compiled optimized. I don't know if it's worth
> > compiling the whole distribution optimized, but at least for some packages
> > it is worth it.
> 
> It seems that package pools could solve this.  A pool could exist for
> different sub-archs containing optimized binaries.  As long as entry into
> the pool was limited/strictly controlled, the pool could remain fairly
> small.  There would have to be some constraint, such as "a demonstraited
> speed-up of at least 15% in processing data or 15% decrease in cpu
> usage on the same load from the non-optimized version". (15% completely
> arbitrary).
> 
> This makes it fairly easy for the end-user to use optimized binaries, just
> have the optimized line first in source.list.  It also let mirrors using
> pool-aware mirroring scripts not mirror the optimized binaries if they
> don't want to.  And since entrance into the pool is very restricted, the
> disk space requirement is not huge (hands waving wildly :).
> 
> Andrew Lenharth

You dont really need it though.  I doubt adding in the MMX/3dnow/etc. stuff will
add much extra to a package,  and VERY simple parsing of /proc/cpuinfo can tell
weather(sp) you should enable it or not.  This has been done in things like the
utah-glx program.  It would probably require some mod's from the authors(or packagers)
to make it do that instead of the #ifdef MMX type stuff, but i dont think it would be
that difficult.


> 
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-- 
Erik Bernhardson
journey@jps.net
--
It is better to remain silent and be considered a fool, than to speak and
remove all doubt.
	-- Abraham Lincoln

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