Re: RH XFree86 spec file question

[Craig P Prescott <prescott phys ufl edu>]

>First off, the -Wa,-m21164a is a flag for GAS, the assembler. It says to
>allow instructions that are supported on the 21164A, aka EV56 CPU, or later
>ones, to be processed if found in the assembly code the compiler
>generates. Without this flag, the assembler will give an error if it finds
>any instructions that are not supported on the base EV4/EV5 CPUs, which
>would include the byte/word ones. And the compiler is not being told to
>generate those instructions; that requires the -mcpu= flag, IIRC.
>
>Secondly, those byte/word ones are *required* in order for certain
>operations, that the Xserver needs to do, to work correctly on the EV6
>CPU. They appear only in "__asm__" constructs, and they will only be
>executed if the Xserver is actually running on an EV6 machine, so there's no
>problem on older ones. They are there because we want a single Xserver
>binary to work on all the Alpha CPUs, much along the same lines as the
>"generic" kernels that are now available.

Ack - sorry about that.  Thanks the good explanation and for
straightening me out.  Was thinking something silly (confused gas'
-m<cpu_type> with the compiler's -mcpu option... *bonk*)

Thanks again,
Craig
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Craig P Prescott                              (352) 846-3145 (Phone)
2011 New Physics Building                     (352) 392-8863 (Fax)
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611  prescott@phys.ufl.edu