x86 boot code build

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Konstantin Belousov <kostikbel at gmail.com> writes:
> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> writes:
> > Dimitry Andric <dimitry at andric.com> writes:
> > > Well, do we still officially support any real i386 machines?
> > No, 486 and up only.  Personally, I think we should ship 586
> > binaries (pentium-mmx) by default.
> There is absolutely no architectural difference between usermode ISA
> between i386 and pentiums, ignoring SMP-support instructions, which
> are usually not emited by the compiler anyway.

By "binaries" I mean ISOs and freebsd-update, including the kernel.

(actually, it's the kernel I care the most about)

> Really interesting stuff started appearing with pentium pro, like CMOV
> instructions. Even more important, -march=pentiumpro generates much
> better -fPIC code (probably could be activated by -mcpu=pentiumpro).

Which is why most Linux distributions target 686, but we can't if we
want to support small systems like the AMD Geode-based soekris net4xxx
and net5xxx out of the box.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no