On 06/15/2009 07:53 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
Way back when in February [1], FESCo decided that for Fedora 11, i586 would be the default architecture, and for Fedora 12, it would be some variant of i686. It's time to follow through on that action item. I've submitted https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F12X86Support. It defines the default arch as i686 + SSE2. Why? - Faster and more consistent FP math by using SSE2 registers - Allows for autovectorization by GCC where necessary - More clearly delineates our support set of targets, sticking true to forwards innovation, not necessarily legacy support What CPUs do we lose that F11 supports? - Intel i586 (all) - Intel Pentium Pro - Intel Pentium II - Intel Pentium III - 32-bit AMD Athlon - AMD Geode - VIA C3 - Transmeta Crusoe
Hmm, I must say I'm not a fan of this moving to i686 by default is fine, but the SSE2 requirenent is a bit steep IMHO. To give an example, the family laptop in the living room (which everybody in the family still uses happily) is a compaq n600c, which has a PIII mobile, and thus no SSE2, isn't one of the charms of Linux supposed to be it runs well with older hardware, well know what it does! That laptop runs F-11 perfectly, so maybe we should decide on whether to drop support for Foo based on a criteria "can an average Foo class machine still run a stock (so gnome, firefox, etc) Fedora decently ?" And in that case dropping support for anything which does not have SSE2 seems a bit steep. Regards, Hans -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
