RFC: Fedora Extras shipping ix86 optimized rpms?

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 10:30:33AM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 10:21, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Question: Shall Fedora Extras support ix86 optimized packages but
> > i386-compiled packages rsp. under shall circumstances shall Fedora
> > Extras support such packages?
> > 
> > Background: Some folks have started to add i686-built application
> > packages in addition to i386-built packages to Fedora Extras, claiming
> > these i686-built, "optimized packages" would result into much better
> > performance of these packages ("up to factor 2").
> 
> those optimized packages aren't faster; at least I find it hard to
> believe.... esp on p4 and athlon cpus where cmov is no gain again ;)

Well, SSE/SSE2 can help for graphic/video/audio applications.
But there .i686.rpm doesn't help you, either the application
selects whether to use SSE/SSE2 or not at runtime, or the packages can
have separate sse2 and normal libs in one package:
/usr/lib/libfoo.so.1
/usr/lib/sse2/libfoo.so.1

	Jakub