Re: configure.in support for FreeBSD ia64/sparc64/powerpc

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

>>>>> On Tue, 30 Dec 2008, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:

> On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:06:04 -0800 (PST), Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu> wrote:
>> > Err, I think there's a misunderstanding here.  The src/alloc.c change
>> > is related to sparc64 not Solaris (not _only_ Solaris, that is):
>> 
>> >     --- a/src/alloc.c	Fri Oct 27 15:45:51 2006 +0000
>> >     +++ b/src/alloc.c	Sat Oct 28 01:49:45 2006 +0300
>> >     @@ -4560,7 +4560,11 @@ mark_stack ()
>> >           needed on ia64 too.  See mach_dep.c, where it also says inline
>> >           assembler doesn't work with relevant proprietary compilers.
>> >     */
>> >      #ifdef sparc
>> >     +#ifdef __sparc64__
>> >     +  asm ("flushw");
>> >     +#else
>> >        asm ("ta 3");
>> >     +#endif
>> >      #endif
>> >
>> > Now, I don't think anybody would argue that there are probably far more
>> > Solaris installations of sparc64 than FreeBSD ones.
>> 
>> Exactly, that code has been running for all other systems just fine for
>> many years.  Why the insistence to change without proper testing?
>> Why not just make the conditional
>> defined (__sparc64__) && defined (__FreeBSD__) ?

> My impression from the original Gentoo bug <http://bugs.gentoo.org/159584>
> is that this affects Linux too,

Sparc/Linux is fine, with or without the patch. Looks like both
"flushw" and "ta 3" work there.

> so making the code depend on __FreeBSD__ doesn't solve Ulrich's
> original problem.

It does, in fact. But testing for the OS still looks wrong to me,
since it is a question of a machine instruction implemented for
SPARC-V9, but not for earlier CPUs.

Could the patch be committed with the "&& defined (__FreeBSD__)", and
we keep in mind to remove this piece after the 23.1 release?

Ulrich