On Thursday 12 October 2006 13:27, Heiko Helmle wrote:

Silviu Marin-Caea schrieb:

...

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 19:13, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

...

We have so far two compiler optimization topics:

* Building for i686 in the future (Bug 186074)

Hell, yeah!!

Who's installing SUSE on Pentium I nowadays? I have a Pentium II CPU to donate to one such individual in the totally unlikely case he exists. :-)

Hm... people may want to install SUSE on VIA C3 machines...

From the bug comments: ==== No, seriously now, found this on http://gentoo-wiki.com/Safe_Cflags#Eden_C3.2FEzra_.28Via_EPIA.29 "More recent versions of the C3 do support the cmov instruction and hence -march=i686" But I assume that SuSE wants to maintain compatibility even with those guys who own these "older" versions too... ==== The people with older C3 versions could just run SUSE 10.1 on them, or run SLED10 that's supported for 7 years. Problem solved. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

On čt 12. října 2006 12:34, jdd wrote:

Silviu Marin-Caea a écrit :

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Who's installing SUSE on Pentium I nowadays?

I do (p233) and it's a sub-laptop, I have no other such machine at hand (and even as second hand it's much too expensive)

Me too! But to avoid a flood (hopefully ;-)) of "me too"s, why don't we have a look at the data that YOU / NCC receives. That should give us an idea what the share of i586-only machines is, shouldn't it? -- Martin Vidner, YaST developer http://en.opensuse.org/User:Mvidner Kuracke oddeleni v restauraci je jako fekalni oddeleni v bazenu --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 19:13, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

...

We have so far two compiler optimization topics:

* Building for i686 in the future (Bug 186074)

Hell, yeah!!

Who's installing SUSE on Pentium I nowadays? I have a Pentium II CPU to donate to one such individual in the totally unlikely case he exists. :-)

Hell to yourself :) http://waxborg.servepics.com is here next to me, running on a Pentium, since 10.0 came out. It ran 9.3 before that. -- Vahis Sometimes I reply to top posters. Seldom. And usually just once. Motorcycling, Boating and SUSE Linux: http://waxborg.servepics.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

On Thu, 2006-10-12 at 13:25 +0300, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 19:13, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

...

We have so far two compiler optimization topics:

* Building for i686 in the future (Bug 186074)

Hell, yeah!!

Who's installing SUSE on Pentium I nowadays? I have a Pentium II CPU to donate to one such individual in the totally unlikely case he exists. :-)

Hmmmm..... How about all of the people using older hardware as a router/firewall, people that live in a country that is not as well off as yours. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

On Thursday 12 October 2006 15:06, Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

Just what is wrong with keeping older distros on older hardware?

Unpatched vulnerabilities? Less importantly, out-of-date package versions? -- Bill Gallafent. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

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.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 19:13, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

...

We have so far two compiler optimization topics:

* Building for i686 in the future (Bug 186074)

Hell, yeah!!

Who's installing SUSE on Pentium I nowadays? I have a Pentium II CPU to donate to one such individual in the totally unlikely case he exists. :-)

Please read the complete thread on the bug, especially my comment: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=186074#c34 IMO that point is ridiculous (where's the evidence ? real benchmarks ?) lame as a typical application ? ah cmon... I've seen these discussions over and over again, and never seen any real evidence that optimizing for i686 (or athlon) instead of i586 actually brings any noticeable performance gain *for typical applications* (OpenOffice, firefox, thunderbird, KDE, digikam, ... or even postfix, apache, ...). Those typical applications usually do a lot more I/O (disk or other devices) than they do raw CPU processing (lame is a really bad example wrt this as it is exactly the opposite). While it might make sense for a very few packages, it doesn't for 99% of them (please please please prove me wrong). When will people understand that compiler optimization flags are no black magic wand that makes your system faster. The best way to achieve a faster running system is optimizing the code itself (use less memory, use more effective algorithms or technologies), not compiler voodoo. Get real. The compiler has a pretty dumb and generic view of your code, it does not understand what you are trying to do. OTOH the software developer can make modifications that provide a huge performance benefit (e.g. not loading the same file several times but load once and cache, do less I/O, use less memory, use SAX/StAX for XML parsing instead of DOM, use optimized SQL queries and indexes, ...). And I've never seen compiler flags make I/O operations faster. Note that -Bdirect and similar optimizations are a totally different thing. Those actually provide a huge benefit wrt loading shared libraries at startup (and hence, make application startup a lot faster) because they more or less "fix" the dumbness of the linker and dynamic linker wrt shared libraries. - -Bdirect is being developed mostly by ppl from Novell (especially Michael Meeks, you can hardly follow his talks about that [1], it's a very complex topic ;)). But you must always take potential side effects into account and this is why changing compiler and linker flags needs a lot of thorough testing because in the end, what we want most is applications that *work*. Optimizing for i686 definitely has a drawback: makes running SUSE on old hardware impossible (agreed, that would be really old hardware, but still). [1]http://ftp.belnet.be/mirrors/FOSDEM/FOSDEM2006-OpenOffice.avi cheers - -- -o) Pascal Bleser http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/ /\\ <pascal.bleser@skynet.be> <guru@unixtech.be> _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFFLjyYr3NMWliFcXcRAlDTAJ4siXHSwxE7FjOfP/0E/ChpEGx1GwCfXt0s GTlBX0xUP7kuF/RxPhulrhY= =ckQ/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org

Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:

On Wednesday 11 October 2006 19:13, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

...

We have so far two compiler optimization topics:

* Building for i686 in the future (Bug 186074)

Hell, yeah!!

Who's installing SUSE on Pentium I nowadays?

Machines I have running currently - Toshiba laptop with a P233MMX (service console) - HP Vectra 486/66. (firewall) It looks like you guys have finished this discussion anyway, but I'll add my bit anyway: it seems to me that the actual advantages of going for i686-only are questionable and at best minor, whereas the actual disadvantages of doing so are quite real and not so minor. I vote for sticking to i586. /Per Jessen, Zürich --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org