Bug#823672: ITP: sse-support -- prevent installation on processors without required support
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl>
> > It might be also good to make a "sse2-support" package as mentioned in
> > the thread Gert linked to to reduce duplication of such detection logic.
> > Please say so if you think this is a good idea.
>
> Saying "so". :-)
* Package name : sse-support
Upstream Author : me
Binaries : sse2-support, sse3-support, more?
Description : prevent installation on processors without required support
This is a mostly dummy package, whose only purpose is to detect the presence
of ${binary%%-support}. It refuses to install on inadequate processors, thus
allowing specifying such a requirement as a dependency.
Detection is done via a "boom instruction" rather than grep /proc/cpuinfo,
because of qemu and /proc-less chroots.
On failure, preinst complains via debconf and on stderr then dies.
I wonder which other extensions would be wanted -- sse4.2? More?
Note that in general you're not supposed to unconditionally use opcodes not
supported by the baseline ISA, but in some cases adding generic code paths
would be either too much work or outright useless. I for one just failed to
obtain access to a pre-sse2 machine despite raiding quite a few places; thus
it's understandable no one bothers to port scientific software to such
museal machines.
I'm afraid it's too late to use this for 686, though.
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