[arch-dev-public] i686 and SSE2

[Sven-Hendrik Haase]

I favor 3) as well. Seems rather easy to implement and I don't really
think we need to support architecture that old.

On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 7:02 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> This goes beyond just adding SSE2 support.
>
> Years ago, Arch Linux was "optimised for modern processors".  These were
> the days when every other distro was using i386 and we had a blazingly
> fast i686 port.  Now every other distro uses i686 while we have sat
> still.  Even major software developments are starting to require SSE2.
> It is time we moved forward.
>
> How can we achieve this?  I see several options:
>
> 1) Do "nothing".  Add a hook to the filesystem package that detects
> whether a system has SSE2 support and blocks installation of certain
> packages.
>
> 2) Add SSE2 to our optimisations and require "i686 + SSE2"
>
> 3) Move our minimum CPU to something less than 20 years old  (even i786
> would get us SSE2+3 instructions and is 15 years old)
>
> 4) We add more modern CPU builds  (and set them automatically building
> once the base architecture is updated).
>
>
> I am in favour of #3 for our 32-bit support.  And that would be end of
> line as far as 32 bit support in this distribution goes.
>
>
> (We may want to consider #4 for our x86_64, but that is another
> conversation).
>
> Allan