Re: Minutes from the "32bit architectures in Debian"-bof
On 26.08.2015 21:08, Josh Triplett wrote:
> Andreas Barth wrote:
>> Specific issues:
>> - for i386, there is still sold new hardware with 32bit-only. Are
>> there open issues for i386 (apart from the 32bit-generic ones)?
>> Discussion that we need to get rid of it one day should be started.
>
> Brand-new 32-bit-only x86 hardware is currently being sold, and will
> continue to be in the future. In particular, the Quark embedded
> platform is a 32-bit x86, roughly i586-class, with no 64-bit support,
> and no MMX or SSE, though it has a few modern instruction set extensions
> (notably for security). So, i386 needs to stick around for the
> foreseeable future.
>
> That said, I see no particular issue with moving all the i386 buildd
> systems to cross-compile from x86-64, to give the linker more address
> space to work with. LTO will become increasingly important, since new
> 32-bit systems will want small, optimized binaries, and building a large
> project with LTO requires a huge amount of memory.
>
> - Josh Triplett
>
Does this cpu then have a 80 bit x87 fpu?
That thing is usually the most time consuming part in supporting i386
for numerical and scientific applications due to its compiler
optimization dependant rounding behaviour.
Its probably a better approach to just not build these type of packages
on i386 at all. Nobody will seriously use them anyway and upstreams are
not likely to care about bug reports either.
32 bit + sse fpu (x32) on the other hand is useful as it can help find
long/int issues in the code that can cause problems on other 64 bit
platforms with other conventions on integer size (like win64).
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