Re: Increasing minimum 'i386' processor
On 11/20/2011 01:08 AM, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Sat, 2011-11-19 at 22:42:11 +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
>> The i386 architecture was the first in Linux and in Debian, but we have
>> long since dropped support for the original i386-compatible processors
>> and now require a minimum of a 486-class processor.
>>
>> I think it is time to increase the minimum requirement to 586-class, if
>> not for wheezy then immediately after. (Later it should be increased
>> further, and eventually i386 should be reduced to a partial architecture
>> that may be installed on amd64 systems.) This would allow the use of
>> optimisations and new instructions throughout userland that improve
>> performance for the vast majority of users.
>
> It seems gcc has been targetting i586 instruction set by default since
> gcc 4.4.0-1~exp1, although the triplet was not changed to match. On the
> discussion regarding multiarch tuples I proposed we should switch the
> triplet back to i386-linux-gnu to avoid this kind of confusion, fix the
> internal inconsistency and the one with other architectures (which do
> not track the base instruction set in the triplet) and so that we can
> use them directly as the multiarch tuples.
>
> For more details please see:
>
> <http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2011/02/msg00061.html>
> <http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2011/02/msg00039.html>
No, that's wrong. i386-linux-gnu has a different ABI for at least some libraries
(libstdc++) than i486-linux-gnu. Unfortunately the proposal to use
ix86-linux-gnu for the i386 multiarch triplet didn't find a consensus.
Matthias
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