Build i686?

Bruce Gray bruce.gray at acm.org
Wed Feb 18 21:32:24 UTC 2009


On Feb 15, 2009, at 2:27 AM, pgmer6809 wrote:
--snip--
> A scan of the myconfig file shows that all of the 'arch' symbols are
> in fact defined as 386.
> Is there a way I can build parrot for i686 architecture?
> my uname -m shows i686, and I have libc6-i686 installed.


On Feb 18, 2009, at 12:42 PM, Steve Peters wrote:
--snip--
> i386 is kind of a misnomer.  It's a generic build for an Intel-based
> chip on Linux.  x86 might be more appropriate, but I believe this is a
> carryover from Perl 5.

++Steve.

Even though Parrot's configurator does not recognize anything finer- 
grain
than x86-on-linux (mis-named i386-linux), you can still provide
-mtune and -march options to GCC to generate instructions for i686,
and to choose scheduling based on known i686 chip pipeline timings.

I have no idea how this might interact with JIT.

Lightly tested on both Linux and OSX:
	make realclean
	perl Configure.PL --optimize='-mtune=i686 -march=i686'
	make
	make test
All tests passed.

On the other hand, remember:
	Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
The internals of Parrot are still in flux, and the flags that produce
the fastest code on any given day might not by release time.

-- 
Hope this helps,
Bruce Gray



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