[arch-dev-public] Discussion - Increasing our CPU requirements

[Allan McRae]

On 29/3/20 11:17 pm, Filipe Laíns wrote:
> I would also like to note that rebuilding everything with forced
> support for AVX2 or whatever won't have much effect. Most packages do
> not have workloads where it would make use sense to use these CPU
> extensions, and as such, GCC would not use them.

That assumes we just add AVX2.  Whereas, requiring a CPU supporting AVX2
would bring other optimizations that would be used.

As I replied earlier, AVX2 may be going too far.  But is a good starting
point for discussion.  If that is too far, what could we accept?
SSE4.2?  AVX?   Surely we can do better than pure x86_64.


To have a separate architecture would require automated builds, which
requires being able to sign packages automatically.  And we have not
achieved database signing in 9 years....  I'm looking for a boost that
could be achieved now.

Allan