[plug] Gentoo vs Debian

[Nick Bannon]

On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 10:24:02AM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
[...]
> >accurate this is but i am interested in getting some opinions. does
> >debian have 686 (P4)optimised binary packages?
> 
> Nope, except for the kernel.
[...]

It has a couple of others, where it makes a difference - notably
OpenSSL, ATLAS, the unofficial mplayer packages. Such packages should
ideally detect the best mode at runtime (or let the linker do it, like
OpenSSL) and "just work".

However, it mostly makes very little measured difference. If you can
produce a benchmark which shows otherwise then the developers will
probably be most interested and want to make that work in an optimised
manner, too.

There's also a difference between optimising scheduling for, say, an
i686 (-march=i686, which is quite common and doesn't hurt older CPUs
much) and compiling specifically for a particular CPU (-mcpu=i686,
which is usually unnecessary. That will do things like generate new
instructions that don't exist on older CPUs).

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal