Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta -- processor-specific versions of other packages [LWN.net]

Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta -- processor-specific versions of other packages

Posted Jul 4, 2002 20:29 UTC (Thu) by tjc (guest, #137)
In reply to: Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta by DeletedUser2427
Parent article: Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta

Won't there be, this time, also 586 versions?

Red Hat includes i586, i686, and Athlon kernels, and an i686 version of glibc. I suspect that the performance improvements that would result from processor-specific versions of other packages would be very small, which is why they don't include them.

Performance aside, they could do it as a marketing ploy targeted at "checklist" customers, but I don't think we should applaud them if they did that.

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Limbo: a new Red Hat Linux beta -- processor-specific versions of other packages

Posted Jul 5, 2002 4:19 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Other than a couple of packages (gzip, ssl, and ???) the speed improvements were no more than 10% if you compiled everything for a specific architecture (i686 for the P4). Also realize that i586 optimizations can cause slowdowns on i686 systems.. and dont even get into what happens on an AMD/cyrix/etc cpu. Having i386 with some exceptions (kernel, glibc, and a couple of apps) is the safest for most customers...