how long to keep support for gcc on x86?

[Peter Wemm]

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> ... ?
>
> As an embedded platform, I'd expect that people will want to support
> any feature which dramatically boosts performance whilst reducing CPU.
>
> Also, if Intel decide to keep trying to push low power x86 for mobile
> applications, rather than ARM, x86 may just make a resurgence in
> places you once thought were servers.
>
> 32 bit x86 isn't legacy and won't be for a long time to come.

Our buildworld environment and embedded $everything isn't well known
for being embedded friendly.  I'd wager that if somebody was trying to
use an i386 kernel in an embedded device where every last thing
counted, they'd be using an external toolchain targeted for their
platform and some very selective cross-building.  Compiler of
$your_choice would be on the table if you were doing external
compiling, and.. the default in-tree compiler does support AES-NI on
both i386 and amd64, and the logical other choice (gcc-4.6+ and
binutils) also does.

The only question is whether to go out of our way to support an
archaic, non-default compiler on one platform.

-- 
Peter Wemm - peter at wemm.org; peter at FreeBSD.org; peter at yahoo-inc.com; KI6FJV
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