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Re: Altivec Linux support in GCC
Aldy Hernandez <aldyh at redhat dot com> writes:
> >> Sounds like a good idea. I think when this all originally went in,
> >> we were being cautious and incremental - -maltivec would always work,
> >> but -mabi=altivec required cooperating libraries and such. However,
> >> I think we're past that initial phase now!
>
> Ok, I will come up with a patch for review.
No, that wasn't the reason for -maltivec.
-maltivec is the ISA selection flag. -mabi=xxx is the ABI selection
flag. There's an important distinction from the user's point of view
about which flags are ISA selection and which change the ABI, because
one set is safe and the other isn't.
If users are confused by -maltivec, it's most likely because of the
name. Historically, all ISA selection flags in the ppc ports have had
short names like -maltivec or -mstring; I believe I made a proposal to
change that but never got time to implement it.
--
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk at geoffk dot org>