i see where you are coming from. however, i sense that there's a
trade-off between high performance, and how complicated is system
configuration, especially for someone who doesn't have time to
do research on the capability of his/her processor. i don't even
see that everyone here is in agreement about whether the K6 should
be considered a pentium+ or a pentium-pro, for the sake of selecting
a kernel configuration *and* compiler optimizations for the kernel
build. choosing compiler optimization and kernel configuration
may not even be the same issue, as Helge Hafting points out.
someone else recently suggested running a program before the
configuration menu starts to set up reasonable default configuration
settings based on the processor type, and that might be an excellent
compromise between maintaining high-performance and kernel simplicity,
and ease of configuration.
by the way, i have tried compiling a kernel with gcc 2.8.1 and
-march=pentiumpro, on a K6. it hangs very soon after it boots.
recompiling with -march=pentium fixes the problem. i'm not sure
if this falls under "compiler weirdness," or whether it just means
the K6 kernels should be built with I686 and -march=pentium.
anyway, i thought i should report this here, sample size 1.
-- Chuck
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