Re: debian i586?

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Oliver M . Bolzer wrote:

> ON Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 11:54:41PM +0900 BOTi wrote...
>  
> > I finally decided to install debian. So far I have only found debian
> > compiled for i386, but not any higher. Is there a port for i586 or i686
> > somwere, like khmm.. Mandrake. I don't feel like recompiling the half
> > distro, somebody must have done this already.
> 
> Nope, there isn't such a thing a Debian for i586 officially. And there
> doesn't exist one I know of.
> The topic pops up on the various Debian mailing-lists occasionally but
> everybody gets convinced, that it is not worth the effort and disk
> space.
> 
> - Basically for 95% of the apps, compiling for i586 brings no gain
> - the performance penalty of i586 binaries running on i{3,4}86 is huge
>   even if they run
> - even in the apps that have a gain, it's not very big, those that need
>   it and can take advantage bring their on optimizations, like 
>   RC5-cracking and gogo the MP3 encoder.
> - it's not worth the effort and disk space. Could be better used to port
>   different architecturs

FWIW when Chris convinced me to compile TL with -O2 -mpentium (using egcs)
back in '98, we saw some very noticable improvements in things like Samba
performance...

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone, CCNA <sstone@example.com>
UNIX Systems and Network Engineer
Taos - The SysAdmin Company