On Friday 13 October 2006 07:43, Per Jessen wrote:

> Whilst on that thought - for those who are really keen on

> running an i686-optimized machine, why not just rebuild the

> entire distro for i686 yourselves? Doesn't the build-project

> allow for that?

If the build service makes it relatively straightforward to build a complete distribution with customised flags, then I suggest that it makes it _more_ acceptable to ship the standard distribution for with -march=pentium or even -march=pentium2, since I suspect the vast majority machines on to which SuSE 10.2 will be installed support all the instructions available on at least pentium2.

If the build serthen those with pre-pentium2 architecture machines can straightfowardly build (and even distribute) a complete installation for their systems, and the majority, using hardware less than nine years old (P2 launched in 1997, thankyou wikipedia), benefit from a better optimised system.

The chances are that people running such old (or unusual, i.e. not AMD or Intel) hardware are much more likely to be capable of building their own distribution for those machines, too.

I run some versions of SuSE on various ancient machines as firewalls and so on (Intel pentium 120, AMD k6-200, AMD 5x86-133 even), but these days my obsolete machines are at least pentium-class, and most of them are pentium-2 class.

Having said all that, all the new machines I use lately (as of several years, really) are x86_64 or EMT64 (apart from the Macs, some of which are still only core duo, not core 2 duo), so I don't really care what the 32-bit distribution is available for.

Ship with -march=pentium2 for the majority, alternative downloads with -march=i386 will work _everywhere_, and if you want in between roll your own, provided the build service makes this straightforward?

--

Bill Gallafent.