[PATCH] Utilize i686, SSE and MMX by default on FreeBSD/i386

[Xin LI]

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On 2010/03/19 14:24, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Mar 2010, Xin LI wrote:
> 
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>> On 2010/03/19 13:15, Daniel Eischen wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Well, we have nanobsd, but having a suitable install tool
>>> for small flash-based systems where you want a nanobsd-like
>>> setup (readonly filesystems) would be very nice.  I try
>>> to write procedures for our embedded systems so others
>>> (neophytes) can create and burn them, but it might be
>>> easier for someone to get started with embedded systems
>>> if they could do it from a release using an install tool.
>>
>> Some computation intense tasks would benefit from enabling certain
>> optimizations which is not suitable for older processors.
>>
>> However, just like John said servers tends to use 64-bit platform more
>> than 32-bit ones, so perhaps we can just dismiss the idea of enabling
>> these optimizations on FreeBSD/i386 platform and focus on
>> FreeBSD/amd64...
> 
> Perhaps I was wrong, but I thought Scott's question was more
> general: is there a desire for a special installation suitable
> to small appliances (usually flash-based)?

At $work we have plans on providing a Flash based images that is
specifically built for some need, as a continuation of the FreeNAS project.

My understanding is that we want to provide images for more "general"
purpose.  I knew that there is still a lot of people using i386+PAE
kernels on their Linux servers although they have > 4GB of RAM barely
because they can "see" the memory in top(1) output.  I personally don't
think it's a very attrative idea.

Perhaps, we can have a separate, FreeBSD based x86 embedded platform
SDK, like what Windows CE has offered as their "Platform Builder", that
can give one a menu to choose which part the engineer does not want/etc
and just build an Flash image for burn into the boot media (ideally it
would use pre-built binaries for some common-case platforms) by using
src/tools/build/options?  Sounds like a SoC 2010 proposal to me :)

Cheers,
- -- 
Xin LI <delphij at delphij.net>	http://www.delphij.net/
FreeBSD - The Power to Serve!	       Live free or die
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