On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 11:36:23AM -0500, William M. Quarles wrote:
Dave Jones wrote:
<snip>
> > C. If it doesn't hurt and it would probably help, I don't see
what's
> the > matter with making an Athlon-optimized kernel.
>
>A number of reasons.
>- It's one more column in the matrix of supported kernels to worry about.
> This may seem insignificant, but it takes quite a while to push
> a kernel package through the buildsystem given how many variants
> it spits out. On a busy day (like for eg, just before release), it
> can take the better part of a day to get packages built.
>- The gain just isn't worth it over the 2.4 kernels.
> Now that the runtime optimisations get performed in 2.6, theres only
> one thing thats missing that would be in an Athlon optimised kernel,
> and thats the optimised copy_page/clear_page, which are really only
> a win when a lot of data is being copied back/forth between the kernel,
> and even then, only under certain usage patterns. I'll be surprised
> if this shows up on any real-world application.
<snip>
Apparently the man who started this thread found his real-world
applications.
I don't see any numbers. There's also nothing specifically
indicating that building for Athlon is why he saw a performance
win. If something else also got disabled (even inadvertantly),
that could also factor into it.
Dave