Bryan J. Smith wrote: <snipping discussion re: relatively fast old-ISA chips>
But the ISA is often only a 486 or lower! Even when the product is sold as 5th-Gen (Pentium) or 6th-Gen (Pentium II) "class" chip!
Now AMD has licensed National Semi's Geode products. The Geode are the Cyrix M2 core, which are Pentium ISA. These are quickly commonplace.
Pentium = 586 obviously.
But AMD was is still selling its E86/SCLAN series too (and was its _only_ product for awhile), which kicks some serious butt at 133MHz, with lots of on-board peripherials.
Also a 586:
"The ÉlanSC520 microcontroller combines a 32-bit, low-voltage Am5x86 CPU with a complete set of integrated peripherals..."
(quoted from http://www.amd.com/us-en/ConnectivitySolutions/ProductInformation/0,,50_2330_8634_8635,00.html
)
Same deal with STMicro and others. These are _huge_ in Europe, as well as non-US markets, and a lot of imports into the US as well. STMicro is notorious for marketing them as "Pentium/Pentium-II" class because they run at 100MHz, have 64-bit memory busses, PCI, ATA, USB, etc... support. But underneath, the _majority_ of STMicro products are i486 ISA.
Yup, looks like there are a lot of 486s there, looking at this page: http://www.st.com/stonline/products/selector/107.htm
These systems are all over the place. In black boxes atop of your TV that have 128MB+ of RAM, 10-20GB disks, etc... Serious power.
That's why I'm all for making the distro i686 optimized, but i386 ISA
compatible.
But... All of the examples you quoted were 486+. Now consider what Jakub Jelinek wrote a little while back:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-May/msg00617.html
"I'd like to make NPTL the default threading library for FC3, as a step in phasing out LinuxThreads." ...
"3) NPTL has not been ported to i386, only i486+, x86_64, ia64, ppc32, ppc64, s390, s390x, alpha, sh and sparcv9. i386 (and sparc < v9) lacks atomic instructions powerful enough for NPTL needs. Well, I have tried to port NPTL to i386, http://sources.redhat.com/ml/libc-hacker/2004-05/msg00019.html, but that port is severely limited and maintaining two different IA32 ports would be too much work."
So clearly a very important dividing line seems to lie between 386 and 486 support. I'm all for going wint NPTL as default for Fedora; this is supposed to be a forward-thinking distribution.
But for plain Jane x86, there is little sense to break i386 ISA compatibility. Yes, _assume_ the "performance/memory/disk" equivalent of a Pentium Pro/II or higher. But leave the instruction set compatibility (ISA) at i386 -- please, for Fedora adoption sake.
Well, as far as I can see it sure seems like letting all programs use NPTL-specific features by default can be a somewhat important perfomance win? That's a real difference that ignoring the 386 would give us, and I have yet to see any examples even of modern embedded processors that don't support the 486 ISA (admittedly, I might not have looked hard enough but the examples you came up with were all 486 and you seem to have much more insight in the embedded world than I do). I think that this makes 486 a realistic base target, and given that there isn't much of an NPTL port for 386
I summary, my main point is that 386 is not the same as 486. Jakub suggests in the e-mail I linked to earlier that in general there is little to be gained from going to --march=i486; however, given that there won't be an NPTL library available for 386 I think it feels more honest to just go with --march=i486 anyways. Not that I feel all that strongly about it though.
Basically I think that I'm more or less agreeing with you: Fedora shouldn't dump old ISAs unless there is a real, tangible gain; moving beyond 486 doesn't really seems to give us that. Where we differ is that I think that ignoring the 386 by explicitly using NPTL is a good idea and very much in line with the Fedora goals.
/Per
-- Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford dot edu> Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University
