On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 11:34:07PM +1000, Allan McRae wrote: > On 19/09/16 23:14, Balló György via arch-dev-public wrote: > > 2016-09-19 7:02 GMT+02:00 Allan McRae <[email protected]>: > > > >> 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
Yes we want it back. I also have systems without SSE4 and if Arch is no longer usable on those I'll use distributions for 'older' hardware on those. But for our day-to-day workhorses I would love optimized binaries. -- Ike
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