[Mageia-dev] i686 must be Pentium II ?

Mon Sep 27 19:01:25 CEST 2010

  Am 25.09.2010 17:53, schrieb Giuseppe Ghibò:
+> IMHO the problem is not finding an architecture to fit the i586 or i686 rpm 
+> flags, rather to find the minimum CPU and memory requirement worthwhile for a 
+> decent usage. With KDE if we look at the Mandriva 2010.1, it's barely usable 
+> on a P4-3000 with 1-2GB RAM, or a AMD Barton 2500. Barely means that windows 
+> and applications are pretty slow to open, switching is slow, etc.; since 
+> netbook are so popular we can consider the minimum requirements as those of a 
+> typical 2010 netbook, which has ATOM 1.6Ghz processor and 1GB memory. In 
+> other words we can consider as default the presence of the SSE instruction 
+> set. ATOM has even the SSE2, which would be even better, but that would left 
+> out some AMD CPU (some older AMD, like 1.2Ghz has only the 3DNow and not 
+> SSE). I would drop compiling for old ISA drivers in kernel (think to some old 
+> ISA 3com card, like 3C505, etc.).
+>
+If you have a P4 with 2GB RAM, and that is slow/sluggish with KDE4,
+i think you definitely should pay more attention to KDE configuration.
+We have some forum users at mandrivauser.de who run KDE4 on
+machines that have less than half of the power of the machines you
+describe, there it is sluggish, but still usable.
+My laptop has a P4 2.8GHz with originally 512 MB RAM, it will swap
+out mostly all the time if you have more openend than a browser,
+but it's not slow/sluggish, and definitely usable.
+
+More on-topic, at mandrivauser.de, some years ago we did hand-
+optimized packages for i686 and Pentium M, for some bigger apps
+like OpenOffice, and if you fine-tune compiler and linker flags
+for every package and every arch you support, there is definitely
+a measurable performance gain, sometimes as big as 15-40%,
+f.ex. startup time for OOo, but not in general.
+
+The downside of that is, optimizing compiler flags is really risky
+and can't be done in general, at least not those optimizations
+that really make the difference. -Os vs. -O2 is not, what i'm talking about,
+it's more stuff like -funroll-loops, -ffast-math and the like.
+But even Gentoo recommendations say those should be avoided,
+and you have to do them on a per-package-basis.
+
+I think we should stay with plain old i586, but the mageia-light
+thing sounds like a nice idea, i must say. We should not do what fedora
+has done and abandon support for those older cpus at the cost
+of what? 1% performance gain? C'mon ...
+
+
+
+PS: Sorry, wanted to get this mail out yesterday, but Thunderbird didn't want to :(
+