Re: i686 Port

[Jörg-Volker Peetz <peetz@scai.fraunhofer.de>]

Gregory Seidman wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 04:06:10PM +0100, Richard Thompson wrote:
>> I was wondering why debian doesn't have a port of packages optimised for
>> i686, I realise they have support for i386, which obviously incudes
>> everything from an intel 386 to the latest and greatest intel and amd
>> processors (running in 32bit), ultimatley the i686 already has 'support'
>> however I just thought it would be great if a port was available where
>> the packages had been compiled specifically for i686 as I have noticed
>> that when I use i686 optimised distro's such as arch, or even slackware
>> there is a noticable performance difference.
> 
> This comes up on the list from time to time. The general answer is that
> packages that benefit from processor-specific compilation (e.g. the kernel,
> Marillat's mplayer "unofficial" packages, etc.) do exist in
> processor-specific forms. The vast majority of packages, however, do not
> benefit sufficiently from processor-specific compilation to justify the
> complication of supporting extra versions of the packages, much less the
> infrastructure to automatically select the correct package for your
> processor when using apt.
> 
>> Richard Thompson
> --Greg

The installation manual
(http://www.de.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s01.html.en) says
that the "i386" architecture packages support *i486* processors and later.
There is also a libc6-686 package optimized for i686.
-- 
Regards,
Jörg-Volker.