On 12/08/10 20:52, Auke Kok wrote:
On 08/12/2010 12:33 PM, Alistair Buxton wrote:
On 12 August 2010 19:07, Ryan Ware<[email protected]> wrote:
David,
Seeing your post is a bit disconcerting.
It's hard to decide write a post like that but I felt it should be discussed
more. I tried to be balanced, raise the issues and my objective was to improve
the current position.
I would completely disagree that
there are problems on non-Atom hardware. The specific problem is that a
Core 2 or newer is needed.
I'm not a CPU guy so I may have conflated atom and core-2. Blame marketing :)
OTOH it's equally disconcerting that a modern linux distro won't run on modern
x86 hardware.
As for the scrutiny point, I guess I missed a "will" out: "not all of which will
stand up to scrutiny".
Please do point out my errors, I am interested in the debate ... I would like to
see a mechanism for broadening the places MeeGo can go.
Yes, that still does leave a lot of older
hardware out in the cold since they do not support SSE3. It does
however,
include a lot of hardware that is out there. It did start selling in
July
of 2006.
My AMD CPU is less than 12 months old but Meego does not work on it.
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep SSSE3
(no output)
Incidentally my 1 month old 6-core Phenom x6 won't run it.
no matter how much we lower the "baseline", there will always be more
people saying "but I have this CPU and that one is not supported".
At one point you have to say "stop", and disappoint people. You can't
satisfy everyone.
I agree Auke. I really tried to emphasise my understanding of Intel's position;
but I feel that the exclusion effect is too high.
Anyhow... what can be done to make the baseline/reference MeeGo a *common*
platform? One that will run on the *majority* of hardware out there and welcomes
the linux community with open arms!
It can be optimised for Atom - and I actually think it needs to be... the
journalists would have a fit if it was a smidgen slower than any other distro.
But the community (by which I mean the "other" community since I know MeeGo *is*
the community <cough>) would currently have to rebuild the entire OS without the
ssse3 optimisation flag. Is this sensible?
What would be the cost of:
* building for x86 [1]
* identifying packages that benefit from ssse3 and building 2 versions of them?
or
* doing what Qt does and having runtime selection of optimised code? [2]
Oh, AFAIUI mic2 will only run on ssse3 hw... so even if you have a core-2 device
(see Ryan, I'm getting it) you may not be able to build an image for it on your
desktop - assuming I'm factually correct still, how does that help MeeGo?
David
[1] x86 = runs on 'popular x86 chips' in laptops/desktops from, say, 2006. This
includes eg AMD Athlon/Phenom. Note "runs", not optimised for.
[2]
http://mg.pov.lt/meego-irclog/%23meego.2010-08-12.log.html#t2010-08-12T11:06:02
--
"Don't worry, you'll be fine; I saw it work in a cartoon once..."
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