Public SourceMage Discussion List

[David Brown <dmlb2000 AT gmail.com>]

I would like to see some additions and changes to the archspec files.

== Background ==
I was thinking on how we add so many optimizations with the pentium4
archspecs and how with some spells (ie mozilla) we have to remove them
in order make it work.  Also, I've noticed problems in the past with
spells failing or seg-faulting when building my system with the
pentium4 archspecs. My experience has been mainly with gst-pluggins
and the gst-register call seg-faulting, something Arwed can't
reproduce and can't fix.  My solution for getting around this is to
rebuild the system with i686 archspec (not really fixing the problem
but avoiding it).  This made me think on a test to see if I could
somehow narrow down the search for why gst-pluggins fail, so I created
my own pentium4 archspec without all the optimizations (basically
CFLAGS="-march=pentium4"). I then rebuilt the system and gst-pluggins
worked.

== Proposal ==
I would like to see minimal archspec files for each archspec that we
add optimizations that are optional to what's needed to define the
archspec. These are not replacements but additions to the archspecs,
the fully optimized archspecs would still be there. For example, the
pentium4 archspecs would get redused to just CFLAGS="-march=pentium4".
 Along with the optional custom CFLAGS users can add back in what
optimizations they would really like and remove the optimizations they
don't want.  The x86-64 archspecs would probably look like
CFLAGS="-march=x86-64 -fPIC -DPIC" because the prelink flags are
required to make the system work, but the other stuff wouldn't need to
be there.

Also I was messing around with the automake config.sub and I noticed
something different about what it returns and what we define as the
HOST for the x86-64 family of archspecs:

dmlb2000@dmlb2004:~$ /usr/share/automake/config.sub x86_64-linux
x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
dmlb2000@dmlb2004:~$

I was wondering if the HOST for the x86-64 family of archspecs could
be changed to what config.sub returns.  The only problem I've noticed
by changing the archspec to this was that glibc checks for
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu instead of x86_64-*-linux-gnu, not quite sure
why, maybe Seth can shed some light on that.

If I don't hear any chickens running around with their heads cut off,
I'll put the additions into perforce in a week, in case people don't
quite "get what I'm proposing"

- David Brown