Re: Specific support for Intel Atom architecture

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 4 May 2009 15:14:57 +0200
> Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > * Tobias Doerffel <tobias.doerffel@gmail.com> 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