[webkit-dev] Proposal: Not supporting x86 w/o SSE2

Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro at igalia.com
Sat Aug 4 11:27:33 PDT 2018


Technically, many of WebKitGTK+'s distributors require that it not use 
SSE2 instructions in 32-bit builds. I am no longer sure which ones. (It 
used to be the case for Fedora, for example, but that changed recently.)

In practice, so few people care about these old machines anymore that 
such use is unlikely to be noticed by many users. Certain software 
(including Firefox and Chromium) has already started to require SSE2 
and is broken on these machines, so the requirement is already not 
fulfilled by other software. E.g. it is clear that Debian is not 
patching Firefox or Chromium to remove the SSE2 instructions.

So times change, and I think we can get away with starting to require 
SSE2, if there is a compelling reason to do so. But according to 
Filip's review in that bug, we probably don't need to do so right now.

Michael



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