Re: Dropping 386 support
On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 07:54:12PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> Steve Langasek wrote:
> > The d-i images really need to be built from kernel-image packages that
> > are in the archive at the time we ship. Optimizing for 486 isn't a very
> > good reason on its own to force another kernel build cycle.
>
> I had not even considered the impact of changing the optimisation, only
> of changing the package name. Steve's right, and we'd have to test the
> new build too. Also, doesn't optimising for 486 slow things down more
> than the current 386 builds on non-486 machines? The 386 build is
> installed whenever we cannot guess the right processor to optimise for.
> It's also installed all the time when the common netinst CD image is
> used, since we can only fit on kernel image on that CD.
There's not really 486-optimized kernel as both core are so simple that
gcc isn't doing any special instruction scheduling. The new
instructions in the 486 are pretty important, though - e.g. bswap can
optimize endian swapping quite nicely and cmpxchg is required for dri.
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