Re: allowed uses of non-baseline CPU extensions
On Sun, Oct 22, 2017 at 5:33 PM, Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org> wrote:
>
> There are two options availabe:
> 1. RC bug that qtwebengine-opensource-src must not be built on i386
> since it violates the baseline, all code using it has to do whatever
> mitigation is already done for the other architectures without
> qtwebengine-opensource-src
> 2. bless the SSE2 usage with a dependency on sse2-support, making
> KDE and several other Qt applications not available without SSE2
>
Option 2 is much better because explicitly supporting such old/rare
hardware at a price of hurting general use cases significantly doesn't
look meaningful to me, even if we fully understand that new x86
hardware with limited instruction set support is still being produced.
SSE2 is aged from 2001 and is very well adopted, and we are now at
2017Q4.
With packages like sse2-support maintainers have the option of
creating different flavors of their packages with modern instructions
enabled/disabled, this gives great possibility to some very common use
cases, for instance "avx-support" on amd64, which is critical to most
scientific software to run at appropriate performance. In this case we
can avoid a painful tradeoff between keeping and raising the baseline
which has zero flexibility.
Users of really old or rare hardware should be able to handle their
own case - by recompiling critical packages themselves, by producing
something like raspbian, or at least by staying on an old release if
they need something can't be supported at all (i.e. upstream removed
compatibility in current release).
Regards,
Aron
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