atlas 3.4.1 and AltiVec

[Camm Maguire <camm@enhanced.com>]

Greetings!  It had always been my hope to generate an atlas2-altivec
package when I got around to updating to 3.4.1.  Unfortunately, the
support in atlas for this is based on the C extension protocol
(e.g. 'vector').  I notice that gcc-3.2 can (optionally?) generate
some altivec instructions, but cannot parse this syntax.  I have
downloaded the patched gcc and confirmed that it builds a faster atlas
passing all tests.  My plan was to save the assembler files thus
compiled, and pass them to the normal gcc as alternatives to be timed
and included in the library.  Of course the easiest way for me would
be if there was a way to have the standard gcc compile these extension
files, which would have to work even on an autobuilder.  Lastly, I
could hope that gcc with -maltivec is good enough to beat or basically
match the hand written altivec C code that comes with atlas, though
this sounds implausible.

Am I stuck with the first option?

Take care,

Camm Maguire			     			camm@enhanced.com
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