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this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Maybe this will convince more people to switch to linux.
Issue is, a lot of people still using Windows, and Linux pro-audio is still questionable at best (lack of drivers, etc.).
I don't think the venn diagram for people relying on pro-audio and using 20 year old computers has a large overlap.
Could be. If you're running a core 2 duo I am fairly certain Linux will run markedly faster than Windows 10+...
I actually still have some old servers with chips from that period, one of them is still being used as my firewall but until last year I was using others to run multiple VMs for email and web sites. Not as power-efficient but they do still work.
I'll be sure to inform my whole company and I am sure they will be on board
Don't you wish... 😜
That's not a guarantee on the Linux world either, but at least you do have the option of recompiling your distro to not use those options.
There's talks from some distros to start dropping support for such old CPUs because it's holding back newer CPUs that could run even faster by using those instructions.
Is it really that hard to include a fallback though? Obviously there's a way to collect the information without that flag. I suppose if you didn't want to take a performance hitting checking the flag all the time it could become a compile option (I would think anyone running that old of hardware would be willing to learn how to compile the kernel anyway), but there should be options available to keep the support available some how?
That's pretty much exactly how it works already. You compile with
-march=x86-64-v4and it'll use SSE and AVX all over the place.glibc does the runtime thing, but only once on application startup where the dynamic linker will link the version of the function optimized for your CPU. But it's a manual process on glibc's part, the variants are written by hand.
Not every project cares enough to do it dynamically like that and it would be a nightmare that way.
The fallback is, recompile with
-march=x86-64which will only use the base set of instructions. Or-march=i486if you want to run on absolutely ancient hardware.Just ordered a system76 laptop, can't wait to use it!
Oh I've set up a couple of those at work! Their systems seem to be rock-solid (at least I've heard no complaints over the last few years), and their tech support is outstanding. Good luck with your new shiny!