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Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2000 12:32:22 -0800
From: George Anzinger <george@mvista.com>
Organization: Monta Vista Software
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To: "James A. Sutherland" <jas88@cam.ac.uk>
CC: Horst von Brand <vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl>,
        "Jeff V. Merkey" <jmerkey@vger.timpanogas.org>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Installing kernel 2.4
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"James A. Sutherland" wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 08 Nov 2000, George Anzinger wrote:
> > But, here the customer did run the configure code (he said he did not
> > change anything).  Isn't this where the machine should be diagnosed and
> > the right options chosen?  Need a way to say it is a cross build, but
> > that shouldn't be too hard.
> 
> Why default to incompatibility?! If the user explicitly says "I really do want
> a kernel which only works on this specific machine as it is now, and I want it
> to break otherwise", fine. Don't make it a default!

I could go along with this.  The user, however, had the default break,
and, to my knowledge, there are no tools to diagnose the current (or any
other) machine anywhere in the kernel.  Maybe it is time to do such a
tool with exports that the configure programs could use as defaults.  My
thought is that the tool could run independently on the target system
(be it local or otherwise) with the results fed back to configure.

(Oops, corollary to the rule that "The squeaking wheel gets the grease."
is "S/he who complains most about the squeaking gets to do the
greasing."  I better keep quiet :)

> 
> BTW: Has anyone benchmarked the different optimizations - i.e. how much
> difference does optimizing for a Pentium make when running on a PII? More to
> the point, how about optimizing non-exclusively for a Pentium, so the code
> still runs on earlier CPUs?
> 
> James.
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