[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

[Chris Jones]

Hi

On Tue, February 8, 2005 19:38, Geoffrey Teale said:
>   Getting this to work is not just as simple as turning the flag on in
> the  compiler, but passing the option to the configure script of the
> application.

Indeed, although it is possible to select the best one at runtime, I
believe mplayer does this. I also believe this is the correct solution as
it causes no build problems and allows for maximum performance benefit (ie
hand written routines for each of the half dozen vector extensions).

> Gentoo packages take care of all this.  Debian, even with some simple
> wrapper scripts will not because it's packages aren't designed to deal
> with complex sets of flags being passed to the config scripts.

Perhaps, but I suspect you can acheive the same effect - you can set
DEBIAN_BUILDARCH to 686 or athlon and so on, and there is a package called
pentium-builder that replaces gcc and family with scripts that allow
options to be passed. Admittedly that doesn't cover configure scripts, in
the few cases that need it you would have to edit the rules.

> render and detailed simulation of viral evolution and spread over a

Absolutely, I would totally expect to see that kind of workload show a
significant improvement with accelerated calculations. Similarly things
like blender and gimp's filters.

> Quite an extreme example but my point was never that commmon usage was

I'd say it was more than quite extreme, most machines don't do extensive
calculations like that ;)

> choice to do it either way - the blind arguement that Debian can do
> anything if you want it to is pointless and counter productive.

Yes and I'm not dismissing gentoo because of the optimisation issue. I
have to admit I'm not a huge fan of gentoo technically, but people should
to use whatever makes them happy :)

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net