RFC: Fedora Extras shipping ix86 optimized rpms?

[Matthias Saou]

Jakub Jelinek wrote :

> > > 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

This is "the proper way" for sure, but there are quite a few of (mostly
multimedia) projects out there that hardcode MMX/SSE support at compile
time, rather than enabling it at runtime when built for the x86
architecture :-(

Matthias

-- 
Clean custom Red Hat Linux rpm packages : http://freshrpms.net/
Fedora Core release 2 (Tettnang) - Linux kernel 2.6.8-1.521
Load : 1.16 1.05 1.01