3dnow, mmx, k6-2 optimizing?

[Puna Tannehill]

Conrad J. Sabatier wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 12:23:18 -0500, Puna Tannehill <puna at imagescape.com>
> wrote:
> 
> 
>>I've been looking for possible flags, optimizations, really anything 
>>that would help me setup my laptop to use mmx and 3dnow.  I've updated
>>
>>/etc/make.conf to -march to the drum of a k6-2, but I'm not even sure 
>>if mmx and 3dnow are being taken into consideration for compiling and 
>>such, especially for Xorg.
>>
>>I did some googling and found people who used CFLAGS like -mmmx and 
>>-m3dnow, but when I run with those options, they fail and said to be 
>>invalid.  they don't appear in 'man gcc' which should have been the 
>>first place i looked.  I'm not finding anything in terms of compiling 
>>or configuring Xorg to use 3dnow or mmx, or even how to check to see 
>>if they are automatically detected and used.
>>
>>Any thoughts?
>>
>>Puna
> 
> 
> I don't know why those flags would not be working for you; I've been
> using them for quite some time now on my Athlon (32-bit) box.  One
> oddity I just noticed very recently is that, with the recent patches to
> "make", the CPUTYPE variable seems to be ignored now, which is why I
> explicitly added the "-march" flag to CFLAGS.  Also, note that I don't
> use "-mmmx -m3dnow" for kernel builds; you don't want to be doing this,
> as it can easily break things in the kernel, but for general builds
> and port builds, it's fine:
> 
> CPUTYPE?=athlon

I had that problem too.  The '?=' should be just '='.  I see in the 
notes that '?=' is for compiling for different machine, but I don't do 
that so I just left is as 'CPUTYPE=' and it added the -march accordingly.

> CFLAGS= -O3 -pipe -march=athlon -mmmx -m3dnow
> 
> # buildkernel variables settings
> 
> KERNCONF=CUSTOM
> COPTFLAGS= -O3 -pipe -march=athlon

I see many people using a -O3, but I've never been able to use any 
optimization levels above -O without compile errors, or having 
problems with SSH.  Just out of curiosity, do you see a significant 
different in performance with that level of optimization?

Puna

It's working for me now, I'm not sure why it was failing before.

Puna