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Re: [PATCH] Support VMX128 Instruction for PowerPC


Nick Clifton schrieb:
Hi Sebastian,

Nope, I don't have access to the official documentation and I guess you
have to sign an NDA or something to get it.

This worries me. If the designers of the VMX128 instruction set have not publicly released their ISA then using unofficial information in this way may be a breach of their copyright.

I don't think an ISA is protected by copyright. Maybe you can patent it, but then you have to disclose it.


Also - do you have a binutils copyright assignment on file with the FSF?

Not yet.


Without such an assignment we could not consider accepting your patch.

Well, my patch contains virtually no code, so I thought it isn't worth the legal stuff. But if it's needed, I'll get the assignment.


Should there an option like "-mxenon" which resembles the xenon cpu or
should there be a modifier like "-mvmx128" which selectively actives the
VMX128 instruction set?

Go with "-mvmx128". That is the name of the ISA extension. There may well be other CPUs in the future which support this extension, so using "-mxenon" might become obsolete one day.

I'm still a little bit unsure here: The disassembler has no -maltivec option, it will disassemble AltiVec instructions by default ("For convenience"). So, should it also disassemble VMX128 instructions by default?



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