Tony Nelson wrote:
I've noticed that F12 will require a CPU with "i686" architecture, and
that my Athlon 1.2GHz won't qualify. I accept that F11 is the last
Fedora release that I'll be able to use. My concern is that many
present Fedora users will be unpleasantly surprised that a new
installation doesn't work, or at least that they've wasted the
download.
The Release Notes, starting with the F12 Alpha Release Notes, should
tell users about this, and so should the release announcements. The
difficulty is in telling them what exactly is an "i686" CPU, as that is
defined by GCC and is said to be a moving target (over the years). I'm
hoping that someone qualified can make the appropriate changes to the
Releases Notes wiki (I don't know what all the requirements are, though
I do know that the Athlon does not support SSE/SSE2).
Is there a simple way for ordinary users to know if their CPU is
expected to work on F12 (as an "i686" according to GCC)? Is there a
tool to run that doesn't require downloading F12?
Quoting Bill Nottingham:
Given the loud feedback, I've updated the proposal at:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/F12X86Support
The revised proposal:
- Build all packages for i686 (this requires cmov)
- Optimize for Atom
Why?
- We don't really support i586 in any meaningful matter
- OLPC still works with base i686
- We are likely doing a mass rebuild for F-12 anyways, might as well switch
while we're doing it
- Atom is the only currently produced 32-bit x86 chip of note; optimize
for what's currently available
If you want numbers, I did some benchmarking of code [1] with various
build options on a variety of processors, with the F-11 gcc code. All
of these results are relative to a F-11 baseline of "-march=i586
-mtune=generic".
P4 2.4Ghz Athlon 3400+ Core2Duo E6850 Atom N270
march=i686/ -1.1% +2.0% +0.9% +0.6%
mtune=generic
march=i586/ +0.3% -0.3% -0.2% +1.3%
mtune=atom
march=i686/ -1.5% +1.2% +0.5% +1.7%
mtune=atom
Bill
[1] gzip, bzip2, math simulation, mp3 encode/decode, ogg encode/decode
--
in your fear, seek only peace
in your fear, seek only love
-d. bowie
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