sfandino@yahoo.com wrote;

> Yesterday, I sucessfully installed NetBSD on an Indy with a R5000 
> processor. I was also able to recompile the kernel including only the 
> things that I need and everything was working fine.
>
> But I have noticed that the kernel is being compiled for the MIPS I 
> instruction set with is suboptimal and I would like to know if there is 
> any way to use all the possibilities of the R5000.
>
> Well, actually I have been trying adding the line:
>
> makeoptions CFLAGS="-mr5000 -mips4 -long32 -Wa,-m5000,-mips4"
>
> but as expected, it makes the kernel crash on startup.

I'm interested in knowing whether the tuning can yield better performance
at runtime.  Most of "extented instructions" in recent MIPS processors are
so-called "multimedia extention" which only makes senses for hand-coded
programs of particular algorithms like FFT or geometry transformation.
On the other hand, GCC might provide more efficient instruction scheduling
which matchs to R5000 pipeline.   Real improvement would be to make
N32 happen, of course.

Toru Nishimura/ALKYL Technology