On Thu, Sep 16, 2004 at 11:39:16AM +1200, Oliver Jones wrote:
I've got the i386 iso on the way, should have it in an hour or so, will let people know how it goes.
You know this is a pet peeve of mine. I wish more distros compiled their apps as at least i586 binaries. No one (or nearly no one) would attempt to use a modern distro on a i386 anymore. Even 486 systems will be hard to come by now.
There are different levels of optimisations gcc can do. Eg "gcc -march=i386 -mcpu=athlon-tbird ..." will generate machine instructions that will run on all x86-compatible chips i386 and up, but is optimised for that particular type of chip. Similarly, 2.6 linux kernels have an option to only use generic i386 instructions, regardless of *which* particular sequence of instructions it determines is optimal for your particular cpu. Anyway, I've seen it suggested that compiling the kernel and the c library for your particular machine and leaving all the other libraries/applications as generic i386 will make a small amount of difference, and optimising everything else won't make that much difference on top of that. Don't have any links or proof to back that up though :p Just 'cos a distro is labelled as 'i386' doesn't mean it doesn't have optimisations for more recent processors in it, just that only use machine instructions that the i386 has. John