Debian x86_64 port ready

Posted Jun 13, 2004 7:59 UTC (Sun) by joib (subscriber, #8541)
Parent article: Debian x86_64 port ready

Congratulations!

Is there any chance that this will get included into sarge? Personally, I think that x86-64 is going to be very popular in a couple of years, so having native support for it would be a big plus for many users.

Another question, how has the compiler tuning settings been used? As the i386 arch has to support anything from the 386 upwards, debian can't really use any fancy stuff here (although I believe that the minimum supported architecture should be bumped to i486 for many reasons, but that's a different topic). But on the x86-64 there are no such legacy concerns, so nobody is excluded if the binaries are compiled using say SSE2 for fp math, and they can be tuned for the opteron instead of the 386, right? Although 3dnow might be problematic, if Intel won't support it in their version of the x86-64 architecture, but OTOH if MMX/SSE/SSE2 can be used there's not much use for 3dnow.