[2016-09-19 20:57:01 +0200] Balló György via arch-dev-public: > 2016-09-19 15:34 GMT+02:00 Allan McRae <[email protected]>: > > > > 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? > > > > Another option could be to keep i686 and x86_64 as is, and introduce new > architectures with automatically built optimised packages for i686 + SSE2 > or SSE3, and for x86_64 + SSE4.2 or AVX. This is something similar to your > option #4, but keeps the compatibility with all existing systems.
Yes! And I vote to put you in charge of the legacy platforms so the rest of us can focus on building software that uses more than half of the transistors >90% of us own. Besides, you'll do a much better job at it than me, given it's been nearly five years I last tested an i686 binary. So I say we create a new architecture that includes all extensions available on >90% of currently available hardware, make that our primary architecture, and let people interested in legacy platforms figure out the rest of the plan. Cheers. -- Gaetan
