Re: fftw3: Patch for powerpc build failure
On Fri, 2004-01-02 at 09:11, Steven G. Johnson wrote:
> Steven G. Johnson wrote:
> > Can you tell us whether -mabi=altivec is really required for programs
> > calling FFTW? I never did figure out exactly what this flag does on
> > Linux. (It is not needed for 16-byte stack alignment, apparently, since
> > I think that is guaranteed by the SVR4 ABI.)
>
> I checked with my co-author on this, and there is an additional problem:
>
> Currently, FFTW detects Altivec by reading an altivec register that says
> whether it is enabled...on other machines, e.g. a G3, this causes a
> SIGILL and we use setjmp/longjmp to recover from the trap. However,
> last he checked, gcc -mabi=altivec caused setjmp/longjmp to try to save
> altivec registers, failing on the G3. There are several possible
> workarounds, but since the ABI seemed incompatible we gave it up as a
> lost cause.
Well... that's a problem, though I expect glibc to deal with that
more gracefully... Possibly only an upcoming version.
> So, with the current version of FFTW, the runtime Altivec detection will
> not work under Linux on non-Altivec machines (last we checked), and
> should therefore be disabled in the standard Debian ppc package.
You can detect differently by using the ELF AUX tables
passed by the kernel to any executable. The AT_HWCAP entry contains
"feature" bits, one of them indicating the support of Altivec, see
the kernel include/asm/cputable.h for the bit definitions.
> If you can assure us that the ABIs are compatible on Debian, and that
> -mabi=altivec won't cause FFTW to fail on e.g. a G3 for other reasons,
> we can revisit this issue and try to come up with a way to detect
> Altivec support properly at runtime. (There is also still the question
> of whether altivec-FFTW-calling programs need -mabi=altivec, and whether
> this will break them on non-altivec architectures.)
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