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Date:      Fri, 5 Oct 2012 00:43:08 -0700
From:      Garrett Cooper <yanegomi@gmail.com>
To:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Dag=2DErling_Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>
Cc:        Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel@gmail.com>, Dimitry Andric <dimitry@andric.com>, Andriy Gapon <avg@freebsd.org>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: x86 boot code build
Message-ID:  <CAGH67wTpZEfMVg_2O%2BFknJ4hu0HpHhPkFog38c_tT8yCFV%2BSCw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CAGH67wQqs9DJoy0LSgKi1_wMFyrHUE69Dgc2dht7q8VXDVAeQQ@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <506C385C.3020400@FreeBSD.org> <506DEB4C.5020508@andric.com> <86haq9hq2c.fsf@ds4.des.no> <20121005033244.GL35915@deviant.kiev.zoral.com.ua> <86y5jll7kc.fsf@ds4.des.no> <CAGH67wQqs9DJoy0LSgKi1_wMFyrHUE69Dgc2dht7q8VXDVAeQQ@mail.gmail.com>

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On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 12:40 AM, Garrett Cooper <yanegomi@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 12:08 AM, Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav <des@des.no> wrote=
:
>> Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav <des@des.no> writes:
>>> > Dimitry Andric <dimitry@andric.com> writes:
>>> > > Well, do we still officially support any real i386 machines?
>>> > No, 486 and up only.  Personally, I think we should ship 586
>>> > binaries (pentium-mmx) by default.
>>> There is absolutely no architectural difference between usermode ISA
>>> between i386 and pentiums, ignoring SMP-support instructions, which
>>> are usually not emited by the compiler anyway.
>>
>> By "binaries" I mean ISOs and freebsd-update, including the kernel.
>>
>> (actually, it's the kernel I care the most about)
>>
>>> Really interesting stuff started appearing with pentium pro, like CMOV
>>> instructions. Even more important, -march=3Dpentiumpro generates much
>>> better -fPIC code (probably could be activated by -mcpu=3Dpentiumpro).
>>
>> Which is why most Linux distributions target 686, but we can't if we
>> want to support small systems like the AMD Geode-based soekris net4xxx
>> and net5xxx out of the box.
>
>      I would target the appropriate architecture (amd64) where it
> matters (amd64), and target the lowest sane common denominator on
> i386. In reality, what does a couple MB mean on amd64 vs i386?

To clarify...

s/couple MB/couple MB in the loader program/

Thanks,
-Garrett



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