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Re: Rd: [RFC] dl-procinfo and HWCAP_IMPORTANT support for powerpc
- From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel dot crashing dot org>
- To: Steve Munroe <sjmunroe at us dot ibm dot com>
- Cc: Brian Grayson <Brian dot Grayson at freescale dot com>, libc-alpha at sources dot redhat dot com, Paul Mackerras <paulus at samba dot org>, Tom Gall <tom_gall at vnet dot ibm dot com>
- Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2005 17:47:22 +1100
- Subject: Re: Rd: [RFC] dl-procinfo and HWCAP_IMPORTANT support for powerpc
- References: <OF5B53CB0D.D358B7F3-ON862570E0.007EB3A8-862570E0.00826FBA@us.ibm.com>
> The dl_procinfo mechanism is intended to for "retail" distributions for
> "general purpose" computers. Like Apple G3 vs G4 vs G5. In the Intel space
> they only support 2 values "i686" and "x86_64". There is practical limit
> (2, 3, maybe 4) to the number of <cpu_types> a distro is willing to
> build/test. For power we are starting with power4 because that it is the
> first implementation of the Version 2.0 PowerPC Architecture (and the
> Weakly Consistent Storage Model).
>
> If you are building a SDK or runtime for an embedded processor you can use
> --with-cpu= to build a optimized version of glibc.
Even then, ignoring embedded if you think that's a good idea (I know
some embedded folks who will not agree here), I still think we are
asking for trouble around the corner. I mean, you know how many
micro-architectures we have, we should probably at least add the
commonly used freescale ones (g4 typically), then there is cell, and
things are still evolving.
I really think it's not a good idea to mix the actual microarchitecture
of the processor with the feature bits.