SSE/SSE2 support in os116

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 4:00 AM, Mikus Grinbergs <mikus at bga.com> wrote:
> Happened to run an older version of mplayer on os116 on XO-1.5, and it
> claimed "SSE supported but disabled" (also for SSE2).  So I looked in
> some Linux forums, and saw there: "CPUID will tell you whether the CPU
> supports SSE/SSE2, but not the OS.  The OS (linux in this case) can have
> SSE and/or SSE2 disabled."
>
> I looked in the config file residing in the boot directory in os116, but
> saw nothing there about the enabling of SSE or SSE2 (not even of MMX).
>
> My question -- was the older mplayer mistaken -- or is SSE/SSE2 actually
> disabled in os116 ?

/proc/cpuinfo will tell you what features the OS detects in the CPU
(BIOS etc can mask/disable features even if the CPU supports them eg
the HW virt extensions some CPUs support). But then the applications
need to be compiled with the appropriate CFLAGS to be able to make use
of the various CPU extensions such as SSE2. Fedora 11 which os116 is
based on generally has them enabled but it would also depend on the
options used to compile mplayer.

Peter