On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 1:46 AM, Daniel Hopson <subsentient(a)universe2.us> wrote:
> Additionally, FESCo would like us to establish a minimum level of hardware
> supported. We are
> working on this list and will follow up with you once we have it
> completed. In the interim, we did
> want to address a couple of concerns that were passed along by Stephen
> Smoogen:
>
> * We have decided to drop support for PAE, so please feel free to disable
> it on the next build
> * We have decided to continue to support pre-SSE2 hardware for the time
> being
I'm very glad to hear this. Also makes me wonder if, since we're supporting
non-SSE2 hardware, maybe we should retarget for i586, for the maximum
compatibility?
x86_32 is, at this point, useful to people who want a modern OS on ancient
hardware, and the more ancient of hardware we're able to support, the more
use this could potentially have. This would allow supporting a number of
VIA, AMD, and even old Intel CPUs.
Since we're going to deal with the quagmire of packages with sse2 as inline
assembly already, and since many of these packages are the same ones that
have problems with i586 in my experience (for example ffmpeg, or it used to,
and mesa), why not aim for maximum compatibility?
There is a performance hit for switching to i586 (which just drops
CMOV/conditional move instructions), but the same is true for supporting
SSE2, and I think at this point people are far more concerned with
compatibility than a 2% or so performance penalty.
Agreed. I think there is interest in doing so. It mostly depends on
availability of hardware and interested warm bodies. We should discuss
it in a "target hardware" thread, which I'll start once I get caught
up. :)
--
Jeff Backus
jeff.backus(a)gmail.com
http://github.com/jsbackus