On 19/09/16 23:14, Balló György via arch-dev-public wrote: > 2016-09-19 7:02 GMT+02:00 Allan McRae <[email protected]>: > >> 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 >> > > > I would not be happy with #3, because I still have two 13 years old systems > with NetBurst-based CPUs without SSE3 support. But of course I don't use > them in everyday use. >
If we limit our choice based on your CPU, then we need to limit based on the other CPU mentioned in this thread. That should not be a consideration at all. What we need to do is think about what make our distribution worthy of being a distribution. Original the selling points were rolling release, vanilla packages and optimised binaries. We have lost the latter. Do we want to get it back? Allan
