Jakub Jelinek wrote :
> > Background: Some folks have started to add i686-built
application
> > packages in addition to i386-built packages to Fedora Extras,
> > claiming these i686-built, "optimized packages" would result into
> > much better performance of these packages ("up to factor 2").
>
> those optimized packages aren't faster; at least I find it hard to
> believe.... esp on p4 and athlon cpus where cmov is no gain again ;)
Well, SSE/SSE2 can help for graphic/video/audio applications.
But there .i686.rpm doesn't help you, either the application
selects whether to use SSE/SSE2 or not at runtime, or the packages can
have separate sse2 and normal libs in one package:
/usr/lib/libfoo.so.1
/usr/lib/sse2/libfoo.so.1
This is "the proper way" for sure, but there are quite a few of (mostly
multimedia) projects out there that hardcode MMX/SSE support at compile
time, rather than enabling it at runtime when built for the x86
architecture :-(
Matthias
--
Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages :
http://freshrpms.net/
Fedora Core release 2 (Tettnang) - Linux kernel 2.6.8-1.521
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