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Re: [PATCH] Support VMX128 Instruction for PowerPC


Hi Sebastian,

Nope, I don't have access to the official documentation and I guess you
have to sign an NDA or something to get it.

This worries me. If the designers of the VMX128 instruction set have not publicly released their ISA then using unofficial information in this way may be a breach of their copyright.


Also - do you have a binutils copyright assignment on file with the FSF? Without such an assignment we could not consider accepting your patch.


Ok, but I'm a little bit unsure how the configuration stuff works.

Well this should actually be handled in the assembler and disassembler source code, rather than in the configuration scripts.


Should there an option like "-mxenon" which resembles the xenon cpu or
should there be a modifier like "-mvmx128" which selectively actives the
VMX128 instruction set?

Go with "-mvmx128". That is the name of the ISA extension. There may well be other CPUs in the future which support this extension, so using "-mxenon" might become obsolete one day.


+/* Opcode is supported by Altivec Vector128 Unit */
AltiVec (note spelling) is not the right name; it is
called VMX128.  AltiVec is the (trademarked) FreeScale
name for VMX; not for VMX128.

Ok. So, maybe for consistency reasons we should rename PPC_OPCODE_ALTIVEC to PPC_OPCODE_VMX?

Yes that would probably be a good idea.


Cheers
  Nick



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