[haiku-development] WebKit SSE2 requirement
- From: pulkomandy <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2014 20:52:32 +0200
Hello,
The JavaScript interpreter in WebKit has started to make use of SSE2
features. For the previous releases, we advertised support for "i586"
machines, which means SSE and SSE2 was not to be used, or detected at
runtime.
If we want to keep this low compatibility requirement, I will have to
switch our WebKit port to the plain C code version of the JavaScript
interpreter. This also means we lose the JIT capabilities, which will
result in a slower web browsing experience. This can only be switched at
compile time.
What should we do? Increase our requirements to need a CPU with SSE2 for
the syste as a whole? Only for the web browser? Remove the JIT? Provide
two versions of HaikuWebKit with different JavaScriptCore engines?
I'd like to avoid the last option, which adds more work than seems
reasonable (haikuwebkit would need to be built 5 times to support all
our architectures: gcc2hybrid with and wouthout sse2, x86 with and
without sse2, and x86_64).
SSE2 was introduced with the Pentium 4 at Intel, and Athlon64 at AMD. So
Pentium III, Athlon XP and anything older would be left out.
--
Adrien.
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