Hi, On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, Alexander Graf wrote:
> Jamie Lokier wrote: > > Alexander Graf wrote: > > > >> I believe the 5% performance hit that goes with them is no real > >> problem, as most people should be using x86_64 nowadays anyway. > > > > *Boggle*! x86_64 is only a few years old, and cheap low-power x86_64 > > laptops are relatively recent. > > So you really want to do dynamic retranslation on ancient hardware? Isn't it a little bit selfish to leave all those poor people behind who just plainly cannot _afford_ better hardware? > To me emulated systems already feel slow on really recent machines, I > don't want to go back to something even slower. Yes, keep on rubbing it in. > If you use kqemu there even is near no performance hit at all, which I > believe is the main use of qemu on i386 anyway. Another use is to make sure your software works on different hardware than you actually have. > Furthermore x86_64 is _way_ faster, as it provides a lot more registers. Again, just rub it in. > I think the benefit you get from cutting the gcc3 dependency is way more > important than a major performance hit that people will usually only see > on the next release of qemu, by which time things have shifted towards > x86_64 even more. AFAICT the gcc4 problem is not even half-way solved, yet you talk about cutting the gcc3 dependency. Tell you what: solve the gcc4 problem first, not only on x86_64, but also on i386 (since it is still the most widespread platform), and ARM, and PPC, and all the other supported platforms, and _then_ we can talk about cutting the gcc3 dependency. Hth, Dscho
