Howdy,
I noticed in ArchitectureRules we appear to be targeting the original Pentium with -march=pentium. Since our minimum requirements list a Pentium II should we look into bumping this to -march=pentium2?
Edit: I dont know much about this, so I could clearly be mistaken if we do something more advanced than this already.
Our minimum target is not the Pentium 2 but the Pentium MMX (first CPU to introduce MMX instruction set support). I don’t know where the “pentium 2” comes from, that is incorrect as far as I know.
gcc2 does not support Pentium 2 anyway, it is too old for that. Using and Porting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC): Invoking GCC
If you want a build of Haiku that uses features of modern computers, use the 64bit version, which targets 64bit processors. The 32bit version of Haiku is a legacy version, use it only if you really need to run BeOS applications that have not been recompiled or rewritten yet.
The rule in architecturerules that you refer to only applies to “x86” and not “x86_64”, so it does not affect the 64bit version of Haiku.
Thanks for the information as always.
I pulled the minimum cpu requirement from our release notes. Maybe there is a difference between minimum target and minimum recommended cpu or do the release notes just need an edit?
I do use 64bit exclusively, outside of testing some changes on 32bit.
I missed that it said “case x86” on the line that mentioned Pentium.
This appears to be an error in the release notes, indeed. I checked the older version, and the release notes for beta 1 says “Haiku has been tested on systems as slow as a Pentium II” but it is not an explicit minimal requirement, just the oldest machine we could find at the time.
That being said, I doubt Haiku would run very well on Pentium MMX and I don’t think anyone has tried it. So I guess we can decide that Pentium 2 is a reasonable minimum requirement. It doesn’t change much as far as compiler flags go, however, we could switch gcc2 to pentiumpro instead of pentium but I doubt it will make a lot of a difference?
That makes more sense.
I wouldnt think it would gain us much to change to pentiumpro under gcc2? i586 vs i686 it appears.
i would greatly prefer that the target not be bumped up, i run haiku on hardware that does not technically meet i686.
I doubt we would. This was more of a curiosity posting from me.
What do you run it on and how well does it run offhand?
There are relatively performant/modern (1Ghz, USB2, DDR3, PCIe) embedded x86 platforms from DM&P that might not be fully considered i686 compatible - but I think they are Pentium Pro clone based (they have MMX) - how many people have ever used these to run Haiku I don’t know!
i have a 1ghz transmeta-based tablet that i run it on sometimes. technically it is supposed to be i686-compatible, but doesn’t implement some instructions, so things that target i686 (like linux distros) usually crash very often if they run at all.
haiku often doesn’t like to boot (its an issue with the gpu, i think, netbsd has the same issue on it) but when it does it is functional - anything that isn’t a browser typically runs fine.
i also have a socket 7 motherboard. i was planning to do some work with it today anyway, so out of curiousity i just set it up and tried to install haiku. unfortunately it hangs during boot both with an AMD K5 and a Pentium 133. i might hook up serial and try to figure out the cause later.
Nice! I forgot about those Transmeta cpus. I had hoped they would stick around for longer. Pretty cool tech.
Regarding the boot failures, I have seen that if the ram isnt at least 384mb of ram. Its not very consistent though.
Regarding the boot failures, I have seen that if the ram isnt at least 384mb of ram. Its not very consistent though.
this machine has 640mb of ram.