[CLUE-Tech] Athlon = i686 in kernel 2.4.7 Makefile

[Dave Anselmi]

"Jed S. Baer" wrote:

> Hi Folks.
>
> I think this is the last strangeness from the RH7.2 upgrade. Searching
> through the kernel mailing list archive, I see speculation on why make
> would write -march=i686 instead of march=athlon, but no real explanations
> about compiler bugs or capabilities, related to using gcc 2.96 for kernel
> compiles.

IIRC, gcc 2.x doesn't have athlon support.  gcc 3.x is the first place that
option shows up.  Now, should you use i586, i686, or k6?  I don't know and
I've never found a discussion of how to decide.

It was suggested to me that the athlon architecture, because of pipelining or
some such, was different than k6 so i686 was the way to go.  But when I asked
how to tell, or how to know whether -malign-functions=4, e.g., was a good
idea, I got nothing.

Maybe someone should write a "GCC Optimizations for Dummies".

Dave