[arch-dev-public] i686 and SSE2

[Connor Behan]

On 16/09/16 03:57 PM, Daniel Micay wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-09-16 at 21:44 +0200, Bart?omiej Piotrowski wrote:
>> Actually, why don't raise the bar higher? SSE2 has been introduced in
>> 2001 ? that's 15 years to upgrade one's hardware and given my sad
>> experiences with computers, I find it hard to believe anyone has that
>> old PC that happens to run Arch.
>>
>> We used to advertise ourselves as optimized for modern processors. Our
>> "i786" really should include SSE3. For the same reason I would not
>> complain about requiring SSE4 instructions for amd64.
>>
>>> I also wish we had some data on SSE2 support across i686 machines.
>>> Perhaps
>>> we should upgrade pkgstats to record *all* the cpuflags? We would
>>> gain data
>>> for future decisions, too.
>> pkgstats seems to have lots of old data. It would be beneficial to
>> start
>> the statistics from scratch and include kernel modules as well to see
>> if
>> our config isn't overloaded.
>>
>> Bart?omiej
> I think it does include kernel modules. It's why it doesn't work
> properly with linux-grsec since it can't obtain that without root and
> then doesn't collect statistics on installs with grsecurity. It might
> just not be published.
What's the point of mandating SSE2 support when 95% of apps don't really
benefit from it? The few people getting SIGILL from firefox and chromium
will certainly mind it much more when they get it from everything. I
would just make an installation hook that reads cpuinfo and warns
non-SSE2 users that they are installing something too modern.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 473 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/attachments/20160917/7ed48879/attachment.asc>