I favor 3) as well. Seems rather easy to implement and I don't really think we need to support architecture that old.
On Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 7:02 AM, Allan McRae <[email protected]> wrote: > This goes beyond just adding SSE2 support. > > Years ago, Arch Linux was "optimised for modern processors". These were > the days when every other distro was using i386 and we had a blazingly > fast i686 port. Now every other distro uses i686 while we have sat > still. Even major software developments are starting to require SSE2. > It is time we moved forward. > > How can we achieve this? I see several options: > > 1) Do "nothing". Add a hook to the filesystem package that detects > whether a system has SSE2 support and blocks installation of certain > packages. > > 2) Add SSE2 to our optimisations and require "i686 + SSE2" > > 3) Move our minimum CPU to something less than 20 years old (even i786 > would get us SSE2+3 instructions and is 15 years old) > > 4) We add more modern CPU builds (and set them automatically building > once the base architecture is updated). > > > I am in favour of #3 for our 32-bit support. And that would be end of > line as far as 32 bit support in this distribution goes. > > > (We may want to consider #4 for our x86_64, but that is another > conversation). > > Allan
