Re: Can a leaf package require SSE2 on i386?
On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 8:47 AM, Sébastien Villemot
<sebastien@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> As the maintainer of julia (a technical computing language built on top
> of LLVM), I am wondering whether I should continue supporting the i386
> architecture.
>
> The bottom line is that julia needs SSE2 (and porting it to the x87 FPU
> requires changes that are beyond what I am willing/able to do, see [1]
> for more details). And the presence of SSE2 is not guaranteed on the
> i386 architecture.
>
> So I have two options: either ship a i386 package that only works on
> SSE2 processors (ideally giving a meaningful error message when run on
> older CPUs); or drop support for i386, which is a disservice to our
> users (the few who have a SSE2-capable but not x86-64-capable processor
> will be left out; and those who are running the i386 arch on a
> x86-64-capable processor will have to cross-grade to amd64 or at least
> use multi-arch with a 64-bit kernel).
>
> Also note that my understanding is that some i386 buildds are not
> SSE2-capable (because they are qemu guests configured as such). So, if I
> were to ship an i386 package requiring SSE2, the testsuite would fail on
> those buildds (meaning that I would have to make the testsuite non
> fatal, or ask for blacklisting of those buildd).
>
> What's your opinion on this issue?
Add sse/sse2 support to libmmx ?
https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Sylvain.Pion/progs/mmx-emu/
> [1] https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/7185
>
> --
> .''`. Sébastien Villemot
> : :' : Debian Developer
> `. `' http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
> `- GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
>
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