On Sun, Apr 04, 2010 at 10:53:09PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-04-04 at 17:29 -0300, Tiago Bortoletto Vaz wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I've faced an issue (#557550) which is much probably caused by a CPU which
> > doesn't support SSE2 instructions. I'm not sure about the best way to address
> > this. Any suggestion will be very welcome. Actually I can see the following
> > workarounds:
> >
> > 1) consider that most of CPUs support this flag, so tell the reporter to
> > compile the package by him/herself.
>
> This is the wrong answer; we officially support CPUs dating back to 486.
>
> > 2) remove this specific flag during package building, ending with a
> > non-optimized software available for all users.
> >
> > 3) create a specific -sse2 (or -non-sse2) package.
>
> Both acceptable.
>
> > 4) ask the upstream to code runtime checks before using SSE2 specific
> > instructions (is that possible?).
> [...]
>
> This is the best. Also there are libraries like liboil that implement
> various common functions that can benefit from SIMD extensions and that
> automatically select the right version at run-time. Perhaps this
> package can use that?
Thanks Ben and all others who showed me I was choosing the wrong way here. I
liked the idea of building an extra non-sse2 binary until the upstream
(hopefully) starts using a liboil(-like) library. If things go well I'll
document somewhere for future reference.
Regards,
--
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