From owner-freebsd-stable Sun Jun 16 10: 0:15 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from salmon.maths.tcd.ie (salmon.maths.tcd.ie [134.226.81.11]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 366D737B415 for ; Sun, 16 Jun 2002 10:00:06 -0700 (PDT) Received: from walton.maths.tcd.ie by salmon.maths.tcd.ie with SMTP id ; 16 Jun 2002 18:00:05 +0100 (BST) Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2002 18:00:04 +0100 From: David Malone To: Stephen Montgomery-Smith Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: CPU_ATHLON_SSE_HACK Message-ID: <20020616170004.GA28556@walton.maths.tcd.ie> References: <3D0CA144.27B68749@math.missouri.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <3D0CA144.27B68749@math.missouri.edu> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.25i Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 09:31:32AM -0500, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote: > I saw in the release notes for 4.6-stable that there is an option in > LINT for CPU_ATHLON_SSE_HACK. I looked all around LINT and the Freebsd > web site, but I couldn't find many details. What are SSE instructions, > and how would I know if my BIOS had enabled them? If you don't know what SSE instructions are, then you probably don't need to worry about them. They are a a sort of extended MMX instruction. They aren't used by the kernel, but you need kernel support to use applications which use SSE (there aren't many of these). To figure out if they are enabeled on your processor you can look for the features line in dmesg and see if it contails SSE, for example: walton 24% fgrep Features /var/run/dmesg.boot Features=0x387fbff Note that older Athlon processors don't do SSE at all and motherboards which forget to enable them on newer processors are rare. David. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message