Fedora compile flags

Fedora compile flags

Posted Feb 3, 2005 10:37 UTC (Thu) by james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to: Interesting, but maybe too late by jd
Parent article: Fedora Extras available for download

The Fedora developers keep being asked this, and their answer is the same (although I've yet to check the compile flags on the Extras packages).

Fedora packages are compiled optimising for i686 (earlier releases) or the Pentium 4 (today). But they normally use the i386 instruction set.

For most packages, there is no performance benefit to using the later instructions. And modern processors other than the Pentium 4 seem to benefit as much from Pentium 4 optimisations (Athlons, in particular, do so much reordering that they can optimise for themselves).

If you can identify a package that is compiled with 386 instructions but would benefit from more recent instructions, and if you can provide benchmarks ("Distribution X is faster" doesn't count since there are too many variables), then fedora-devel@redhat.com would love to hear from you.

Incidentally, AMD K6-based computers count as i586 as far as gcc is concerned.

James.

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