On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 02:23:58PM -0500, Bill Schmidt wrote:
> Support for Power8 features and the new powerpc64le-linux-gnu target,
> including the ELFv2 ABI, has been developed up till now on the
> ibm/gcc-4_8-branch. It was appropriate to use this separate branch
> while the support was unstable, but this branch will not represent a
> particularly good support mechanism for distributions going forward.
> Most distros are set up to pull from the major release branches, and
> having a separate branch for one target is quite inconvenient. Also,
> the ibm/gcc-4_8-branch's original purpose is to serve as the code base
> for IBM's Advance Toolchain 7.0. Over time the two purposes that the
> branch currently serves will diverge and make things even more
> complicated.
>
> The code is now tested and stable enough that we are ready to backport
> this support to the FSF 4.8 branch. This patch series constitutes that
> backport.
I guess the most important question is what guarantees there are that it
won't affect non-powerpc* ports too much (my main concern is the 9/26 patch,
plus the C++ FE / libstdc++ changes), and how much does this affect
code generation and overall stability of the PowerPC big endian existing
targets.
Jakub
