Re: armelfp: new architecture name for an armel variant

[Konstantinos Margaritis <markos@genesi-usa.com>]

On Thursday 15 July 2010 19:48:43 Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> Note that the new alternative to hwcap is called "multiarch" in the GNU
> libc (something totally different than "multiarch" in Debian). It allows
> to provide different versions of a given symbol using an IFUNC symbol
> type. This will be resolved by the dynamic loader during relocation
> depending on the hardware characteristics.
> 
> This avoid building multiple version of the same software (but still
> multiple versions of a given function), and to introduce more
> granularity (e.g. on x86 SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE4.2, AVX, etc).

So, in essence an application/library can include in the same binary multiple 
versions of the same function and the system picks one depending on the 
current cpu capabilities? So things like autodetecting SSE/Altivec, etc are 
not needed anymore?

> Currently only x86, x86_64, ia64, powerpc and sparc are supported, but
> it should not be difficult to add support for more architectures.

I'm interested in that, is it documented somewhere? ( I know the old hwcap was 
not at all, unless one wanted to read half of glibc source code).

Regards

Konstantinos