Re: Architecture baseline for Forky

Hi,

On 10/27/25 9:15 AM, Jan-Daniel Kaplanski wrote:

> Besides, the armhf baseline of armv7-a+fp aligns with the Cortex-A8 from 
> 2005[2]. I highly doubt that archaic architecture has a lot of users 
> besides SBCs up to the generation of RPi 2 and legacy embedded systems 
> that are likely EOL too. Especially since aarch64 came in 2012 with 
> armv8-a on the Cortex-A53/A57[3][4].

It makes sense to base the support on whether dropping older platforms 
actually gains something tangible. This was true for i386 .. i686, as we 
gained enough extra registers that -fPIC no longer incurred a 5% 
performance penalty, but the differences between iterations of other 
architectures are a lot smaller.

Newer machines might have a better vector unit, but this does not make a 
lot of difference outside of a bunch of mostly scientific applications 
that already select an appropriate computation kernel at runtime, and 
differences in instruction scheduling are better handled by assuming a 
way newer-than-baseline model for -mtune=.

That said, it would be nice to have a way to crossgrade architectures 
when the ABI is compatible, that would allow us to just create ports for 
older architectures, and shunt people over.

    Simon