Subject: Re: Any news on 450 G4?
From: Jason Titus (jason@iatlas.com)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 15:30:38 MDT
I've spent a fair amount of time investigating the AltiVec additions to gcc,
and as far as I can tell they will not be included in the general tree
anytime too soon unless some real initiative is taken. Apple has a version
of egcs 1.12 (w/ source) for Darwin that is hacked up to support AltiVec,
but the egcs team says they have not received the patches.
Also, generating the patches will not be a simple process, since Apple has
removed support for anything but Mac OS X / Darwin from their source tree
(is this allowed under the GPL?)...
It sure would be a great thing to be able to harness the power of AltiVec
from Linux.
If anyone is working on this and would like help - please pop me a note and
I'll do whatever I can!
Jason.
jason@iatlas.com
p.s. - the following is a note I sent to one of the Apple Darwin developers.
It was forwarded on, but I haven't received a reply.
--------
Just wondering - I saw your note on the Darwin mailing list in August about
merging Apple's AltiVec patches to the main gcc source tree, and thought
this might be of interest to you. I work with Mac OS, Mac OS X, and
LinuxPPC and am looking forward to taking advantage of AltiVec instructions
across all three.
I had originally considered doing a diff between egcs 1.1.2 and the egcs2
tarball, but was concerned about the large sections of egcs that had been
striped out. Is there any work being done to make these patches? gcc
(2.95.1+) is having a number of new optimizations added to it, and it would
be great to be able to take advantage of them on all Mac hardware platforms.
Let me know if I could be of any help, and thanks for all the hard work!
Jason Titus
jason@iatlas.com
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http://egcs.cygnus.com/ml/gcc/1999-09/msg00915.html
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Re: egcs and altivec vector type
* To: dyoung at vviuh221 dot vvi dot com
* Subject: Re: egcs and altivec vector type
* From: David Edelsohn <dje at watson dot ibm dot com>
* Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 13:09:03 -0400
* Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> David Young writes:
David> Does egcs correctly generate code for the altivec vector and pixel
types?
David> What is the status of this feature?
David> Is there a URL explaining the status or plan of this feature for
egcs?
Apple apparently has a version of egcs-1.1.2 with AltiVec
functionality added available from an Apple website. I have not received
any contact from Apple about a timetable for contributing that work back
to GCC. Hopefully all of Apple's changes eventually will be incorporated
into the GCC public sources so that they do not need to maintain a
divergent branch and can utilize GCC development more rapidly.
David
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*
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Nov 02 1999 - 16:20:57 MST