On 2025-09-16, at 1:45 PM, Stan Johnson wrote:
On 9/16/25 12:36 PM, Christian Zigotzky wrote:
On 16 September 2025 at 5:10 pm, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
<glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
Another idea could be to disable Altivec for the 32-bit port and
enable it on the 64-bit port so that the 64-bit embedded CPUs could
use the 32-bit port.
That sounds good.
PowerMac G4 systems, such as PPC G4 MDD, are 32-bit, but they also
support Altivec.
Given the option of
a) disabling altivec for all PPC machines, vs
b) just for that one PPCG4 system
it would easily be the less crippling option to sacrifice Altivec for
that one PPC G4 system rather than sacrifice it for everyone.
Of course, upstreaming runtime Altivec detection is the best. Not at
all likely to happen 20 years after these machines left the gate, but
still, best if they will accept it. There are many examples of how to
do runtime Altivec detection that present themselves with 5 minutes of
Googling, including some compelling patches in FIreFox added by Cameron
Kaiser.
I have no idea how likely it would be to sell a separate linux PPC
build farm of +altivec and -altivec to the debian powers that be.
Probably not much enthusiasm for maintaining that, but who knows.
Ken