-------- Original message -------- From: pulkomandy Date:10/01/2014 2:52 PM (GMT-05:00) To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [haiku-development] WebKit SSE2 requirement 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. these cpus are at least a decade old. changing the minimum requirements after all this time seams reasonable. and the new cpus support all the old instructions so beos software will be uneffected sean