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Date:      Sat, 20 Mar 2010 04:46:21 +1100 (EST)
From:      Bruce Evans <brde@optusnet.com.au>
To:        John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        src-committers@FreeBSD.org, svn-src-all@FreeBSD.org, Xin LI <delphij@FreeBSD.org>, Ivan Voras <ivoras@FreeBSD.org>, svn-src-head@FreeBSD.org, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd@gmail.com>
Subject:   Re: I486_CPU and I586_CPU removed from GENERIC kernel [was Re: svn commit: r205307 - head/sys/i386/conf]
Message-ID:  <20100320043345.J2151@besplex.bde.org>
In-Reply-To: <201003191316.04620.jhb@freebsd.org>
References:  <7d6fde3d1003182333m336d52fbh987035a21568250d@mail.gmail.com> <9bbcef731003190913k4f3afbd8mb4e767c40433be8e@mail.gmail.com> <201003191316.04620.jhb@freebsd.org>

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On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, John Baldwin wrote:

> On Friday 19 March 2010 12:13:00 pm Ivan Voras wrote:
>> SSE in the userland you mean? Regardless, I don't think there is now
>> reason for compiling everything as for i386. E.g. why not add at least
>> -mtune=generic or even also -march=i686 to default gcc options?
>>
>> http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/i386-and-x86_002d64-Options.html
>
> I actually suggested using -mtune=i686 several years ago for i386.  Using
> -mtune=generic probably would be a good thing to use when CPUTYPE is not
> specified for i386 and amd64 now.

Er, isn't -mtune=generic the default in gcc-4.2?  I once fought with
gcc-4.2 to produce kernels with similar size and compile time to ones
produced by gcc-3 (impossible for the runtime since gcc got another
40% slower and kernel source size and complications expanded another
40% even when the object size didn't bloat much).  It took -i386
and a couple of other flags like -fno-inline-functions-called-once
(the latter is also needed to unbreak debugging with ddb and profiling).
The flags had very little difference on runtime efficiency, partly because
I ran the kernels mainly on Athlons which run old i386-optimized code
amazingly well but gain on benefits from i686 optimizations.  Optimizing
Athlon kernels for Athlons also makes little difference but I usually do
it.

Bruce



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