[Bug target/15653] [3.4 Regression]: Gcc 3.4 ICE on valid code

[wilson at specifixinc dot com]

------- Additional Comments From wilson at specifixinc dot com  2004-06-16 01:13 -------
Subject: Re:  [3.4 Regression]: Gcc 3.4 ICE on valid code

On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 09:11, vmakarov at redhat dot com wrote:
> I'll send a patch for solving this problem too.  I don't think we should pay
> attention to legacy hardware like itanium1.  Could somebody tell me how many
> itanium1 machines are used now? And who are using them?  I think we should
> remove code supporting Itanium1.

We can't just drop Itanium1 support.  I tried reducing Itanium1 support
from binutils.  Specifically, I modified binutils to emit the brl
(branch long) instruction by default instead of a longer non-brl
sequence.  This instruction is implemented in hardware in Itanium2, and
emulated in software on Itanium1.  The ABI requires that brl be
emulated, so the only effect on Itanium1 was that some large programs
would run a little slower.  A few months later, HJ submitted a binutils
patch that added an option to emit the non-brl sequence for Itanium1
targets.  Obviously, someone still cares about Itanium1 performance,
though it is likely a very small number of people.  Maybe someone has a
large installation of Itanium1 machines that they can't afford to just
throw away?

For FSF GCC release purposes, I think we can consider Itanium1 specific 
optimization bugs as less important than general Itanium bugs.


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http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=15653