Kernel Optimizations Regarding SSE

[Anthony M. Agelastos]

Hello all,

I am, as we converse, rebuilding world to 5-STABLE (from 5.4-STABLE 3  
weeks ago). This is the first time that I am building a custom kernel  
and it only deviates from GENERIC in that I only have

cpu         I686_CPU (without the I586 and I486 that were there from  
GENERIC)

and I added

option    CPU_ENABLE_SSE (per the Handbook's suggestion for Video  
Playback)

That is it. In watching the compile of the new kernel, I notice that  
just about every cc command has the options:

-mno-mmx -mno-3dnow -mno-sse -mno-sse2

Is it me, or does those flags appear to be turning off the very thing  
I wanted turned on (to turn it on, wouldn't it be -mmmx -m3dnow -msse  
-msse2)? My machine, since it is busy right now compiling in Single  
User Mode and I can't get to dmesg, is running 5.4-STABLE synced from  
3 weeks ago, compiling 5-STABLE synced from yesterday evening (EDT).  
My machine's specs are as follows:

Pentium III // 450 MHz
320 MB RAM
Nvidia Riva TNT / 8 MB VRAM

Back when I had Gentoo on this machine, I had to enable sse and sse2  
when I compiled things like MPlayer so the machine could handle  
playing back DVDs (and not drop half of the frames). After reading  
through make.conf's example and its manpage, I was also wondering if  
these (sse) were options that I should put in there (and if so, how  
do I do it)? Any and all guidance on the matter would be greatly  
appreciated. Thank you.

-Anthony

PS - In case it is relevant, and I am forced to go off of memory  
since my machine is still compiling, my make.conf file has the flags  
required so that when things compile, they have the options

-O -pipe -march=pentium3

(there are only about 3 lines in there... I can list them if needed  
once this is done compiling).