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Re: two more architectures?



On Sun, Oct 27, 2002 at 12:49:04PM -0400, Oleg wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Why doesn't Debian add two more architectures: P4 and Athlon4? A bit more 
> space will be used on Debian mirrors, but the bandwidth will not increase 
> (unless more people start using Debian) and the extra maintenance in most 
> cases will be limited to CPU-specific compiler options. The obvious advantage 
> is the speed increase from better optimizations.
> 
> Cheers,
> Oleg

Why can't you just build the packages from Debian source and tweak the
compile flags?  The maintainers should worry about other things than getting
the optimization tweaked for processors that are still expensive and still
not the norm for Debian.  Even so, it is not like a lot of the packages NEED
that level of optimization.  I think saving half of a nanosecond by
recompiling the 'ls' command with P4 operations is just plain silly.

If we're going to do this, let's do it with packages that have a
significant increase in speed by doing so.  These are the only ones that
I can think of off the top of my head:

The kernel
The Gimp
libssl
OpenSSH
gpg(?)

Even with that, it might just be easier to compile from source.

My two cents,

-- 
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Edward Guldemond

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