Re: Specific support for Intel Atom architecture

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Mon May 04 2009 - 13:56:36 EST



* Arjan van de Ven <arjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, 4 May 2009 15:14:57 +0200
> Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> >
> > * Tobias Doerffel <tobias.doerffel@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > > Am Sonntag, 3. Mai 2009 08:48:54 schrieb H. Peter Anvin:
> > > > Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > > > >> $(call cc-option,-march=atom,-march=i686)
> > > > >
> > > > > if it's an in-order architecture, wouldn't it be better to tune
> > > > > for i386 or i486 instead ?
> > > >
> > > > Possibly. It would be worth measuring.
> > >
> > > How would one do that (never benchmarked kernel stuff before)?
> >
> > A standard method is to run lmbench and compare the results -
> > lmbench has a built-in 'report comparison between two runs'
> > feature.
>
> well... you're normally REALLY hard pressed to measure compiler
> differences this way.....
>
> normally compiler options get benchmarked using speccpu and the
> like....

Well, if there's no measurable difference in lmbench at all then the
options probably dont matter that much. If some workload is found
where compiler options show a difference then that matters. Speccpu
only matters if those compiler options also help the kernel, in a
measurable way.

Ingo
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