On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 07:54:12PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > Steve Langasek wrote: > > The d-i images really need to be built from kernel-image packages that > > are in the archive at the time we ship. Optimizing for 486 isn't a very > > good reason on its own to force another kernel build cycle. > > I had not even considered the impact of changing the optimisation, only > of changing the package name. Steve's right, and we'd have to test the > new build too. Also, doesn't optimising for 486 slow things down more > than the current 386 builds on non-486 machines? The 386 build is > installed whenever we cannot guess the right processor to optimise for. > It's also installed all the time when the common netinst CD image is > used, since we can only fit on kernel image on that CD.
There's not really 486-optimized kernel as both core are so simple that gcc isn't doing any special instruction scheduling. The new instructions in the 486 are pretty important, though - e.g. bswap can optimize endian swapping quite nicely and cmpxchg is required for dri.
