[arch-dev-public] i686 and SSE2

[Allan McRae]

On 19/09/16 23:14, Balló György via arch-dev-public wrote:
> 2016-09-19 7:02 GMT+02:00 Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org>:
> 
>> 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
>>
> 
> 
> I would not be happy with #3, because I still have two 13 years old systems
> with NetBurst-based CPUs without SSE3 support. But of course I don't use
> them in everyday use.
> 

If we limit our choice based on your CPU, then we need to limit based on
the other CPU mentioned in this thread.

That should not be a consideration at all. What we need to do is think
about what make our distribution worthy of being a distribution.
Original the selling points were rolling release, vanilla packages and
optimised binaries.  We have lost the latter.  Do we want to get it back?

Allan