[PATCH] Support VMX128 Instruction for PowerPC

[Nick Clifton]

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.

Also - do you have a binutils copyright assignment on file with the FSF? 
Without such an assignment we could not consider accepting your patch.


> Ok, but I'm a little bit unsure how the configuration stuff works.

Well this should actually be handled in the assembler and disassembler 
source code, rather than in the configuration scripts.

> 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.

>>> +/* Opcode is supported by Altivec Vector128 Unit */
>> AltiVec (note spelling) is not the right name; it is
>> called VMX128.  AltiVec is the (trademarked) FreeScale
>> name for VMX; not for VMX128.
> 
> Ok. So, maybe for consistency reasons we should rename
> PPC_OPCODE_ALTIVEC to PPC_OPCODE_VMX?

Yes that would probably be a good idea.

Cheers
   Nick