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Today's Topics:
1. Fwd: [om-general] Community poll about i586 - have your say!
(Per ?yvind Karlsen)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2015 17:06:01 +0200
From: Per ?yvind Karlsen <[email protected]>
To: Cooker OpenMandriva <[email protected]>
Subject: [OM Cooker] Fwd: [om-general] Community poll about i586 -
have your say!
Message-ID:
<CA+0WU1R6AyOtnHaGuPW=kfxozyjzncslvoanlwabb9dd9we...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Per ?yvind Karlsen <[email protected]>
Date: 2015-06-12 17:02 GMT+02:00
Subject: Re: [OM Cooker] [om-general] Community poll about i586 - have
your
say!
To: Giuseppe Ghib? <[email protected]>
Another argument for keeping i586 port is that x86_64 has eliminated
virtual mode, ie. i586 build of dosbox is way faster than x86_64
because of
this...
Also do not forget that people who care about performance, multimedia
etc.,
would most likely not have legacy hardware, so 5-15% would be hugely
irrelevant to most of those people. (btw. while some i586 has mmx
support,
pentium pro has not)
Fedora (likely others also, like Ubuntu) has switched to -march=i686
-mtune=atom, I've changed our to -march=i586 -mtune=atom for a while
back,
so where Fedora doesn't offer an option for legacy hardware (very
common in
third world countries, schools etc.), we do offer, which allows us to
fill
a nich? market.
These i586 class systems still do a good enough job for personal
servers,
routers, terminal clients (especially think of schools) etc.
So offering a merely 5-15% performance increase for systems who are
such
low performance to begin with, doesn't offer much appeal to users.
List of processors without cmov that my research came across:
Intel Pentium
Intel Pentium MMX
Intel Atom Diamonville
Intel Atom Silverthorne
Intel Atom Linthorne
Intel Atom Penwell
A few more Intel Atom 32 bit
AMD K5
AMD K6
AMD K6-2
AMD K6-3
AMD Geode series: (ie. OLPC, and various others)
AMD GeodeGXm
AMD GeodeGXLV
AMD GeodeGX1
AMD GeodeGX2
AMD GeodeLX (In 2009, comments by AMD indicated that there are no plans
for
any future micro architecture upgrades to the processor and that there
will
be no successor; however, the processors will still be available with
the
planned availability of the Geode LX extending through 2015)
Cyrix Cx5x86
Cyrix 6x86
Cyrix MediaGX
Cyrix MediaGXi
Cyrix MediaGXm
Via C3 (which have interesting features such as low power consumption
and
heat generation, also hardware accelerated random number generator)
Via C7(?) (Hardware support for SHA-1 and SHA-256, hardware based
"Montgomery multiplier" supporting key sizes up to 32K for public-key
cryptography)
Via Eden
Via Eden ESP
Via Eden-N
Via Eden ULV
WinChip C6
WinChip 2
WinChip 2A
WinChip 2B
WinChip 3
Nexgen Nx586
Rise mP6
Vortex86
Vortex86SX
Vortex86EX2
Vortex86MX+
Vortex86DX
Vortex86DX2
Notice that several of these cpus, especially like the Via, Geode etc.
are
still popular for embedded and for media centers as well due to VPU
hardware acceleration etc...
So please leave as is, i586 compatibility is a feature offered which
less
and less others do, while i686 offers a meager 5-15% performance
increase
on systems that far fewer people have interest in.
2015-06-10 23:16 GMT+02:00 Giuseppe Ghib? <[email protected]>:
On 09/06/2015 08:18, Per ?yvind Karlsen wrote:
we've have already had this discussion several times in the past,
first
about i686 related to turbolinux, then later on a couple of times a
couple
of years ago or so...
5-15% performance increase on legacy hardware isn't really noticable
for
end users (I've changed to -mtune=atom btw., should help), while i585
compatibility is still a nich? feature that fewer and fewer others are
supporting.
Being a distro that supports i586 was the argument back then for keep
supporting it due to still several both old (and usable, ie. like via
c3)
and some new cpus lack cmov instruction, while in third world
countries
i586 are still common, ie. especially think of schools etc. where they
make
perfect terminal clients for a more terminal server. Killing it off,
kills
of potential market...
So I *INSIST* on keeping it, discard the i586 port and I'll take
whatever means to prevent it.
And why the fuck do you have polls on this through OMA?
OMA is not involved with the distro development, that should be pretty
fucking clear by now!
If anything, this poll should merely be a poll and nothing but a poll
just
to give some overview and act as an indicator to developers of
popularity..
cooker should be the place to make this decission, shouldn't this
have
been made clear several times over the past couple of years??
Hijacking the project two weeks after it was made ultimately clear
proved
it not to be, but OMA should have been made clear of this grand
mistake by
then...
If not, you'll just wither and die...
--
Regards,
Per ?yvind
2015-06-08 15:06 GMT+02:00 Nicol? Costanza <[email protected]>:
In my opinion, the 32bit is necessary and mandatory still for few
year,
the i686 support is good for over 99% of 32bit users, and the best
it's a
bit faster than i586 especially in the multimedia field...
(I am saying all that from my experience of MIB with Mandriva upto
2011,
where all our packages stored into MIB repositories for 32bit were:
i686
only rebuilt, also my Kernels were all i686, and noone of our 32bit
users
had any problems with i686 arch in their 32bit PCs, as results we had
results like from 5 to 15% faster than i586)
More: a move from i586 to i686 would be perceived as an improvement
and a
progress!
(i686 is working fine and better in the 99%, and likely more, of all
32bit PCs,
the i586 only capable cpus are hardly findable and are rather like a
whitefly)
Actually we can distinguish a few categories where 32bit are used.
1) old i586 (those have MMX).
2) plain i686 (this is Pentium II, PentiumPro, Pentium III) with MMX
and
SSE.
3) i686 with SSE2. What really would be worthwhile here and what is
really
giving some burst (e.g. having something perceivable in video
playback) is
to support in 32bit the -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse flagset as standard
math
(this is also enabled by default in the x86_64 compiler). This is
basically
a Pentium 4 of 2000 and beyond (15 years old). Most of old AMD CPUs
support
MMX, 3DNOW, and even SSE, but not SSE2.
4) Atom. Most of atoms supports even x86_64 set as well as up to SSE3
or
beyond. IIRC (but don't take this as written in stone) the only
problem of
atoms is that they don't support "out of order execution" which is
basically enabled in every 32bit arch. So in atom while even running
the
x86_64 mode is better than i586 (apart the increased memory
requirement)
the lack of out of order execution (which is automatically enabled in
x86_64 compiler) is penalizing. That's why specific 32bit Athlon
optimization could (but also with the SSE and SSE2) be worthwhile (i'd
like
to see some benchmark here where also the glibc is optimized with the
same
flags). Of course disabling out of order (admitting would be possible)
would be penalizing for the CPUs supporting it.
5) cmov or not cmov.
6) Emulators and virtual machines. Using 32bit OSes have sense TODAY
in a
virtualized enviroment where you want to save some memory. E.g. you
might
have a lot of tiny VMs running at the same time with minimal memory
impact.
But those VMs usually tipically runs on recent CPUs, which is very
rare not
having the SSE2 set.
Another problem is the memory impact. While for instance I've a dual
CPU
motherboard based on Pentium III Coppermine, with 1GB memory (so 1GB
was
possible there), but most of old CPUs runs with at most 128 or 256MB
of
memory. I wonder if with such quantity of memory even the installer
would
start. Has someone measured (e.g. in a Virtual Machine) what is the
mimimal
amount of memory required to run the installer?
Agreed that one can setup a terminal environment there with a tiny X11
without a desktop toolkit, but the 2nd problem comes with the graphic
card.
Most of old cards of that age (e.g. S3 Virge, Matrox Millennium) for
which
we still compile and provide the drivers, aren't working at all with
that
drivers anymore.
Note that I'm not saying of killing any i586, this or that, support.
Bye.
Giuseppe.
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