Many thanks Andreas for the grand update. So when we get SP1 we get the full package. Roll on SP1 ;o)
Regards, Dick Waite Mobile: +49 171 8393 769 -------------------------- Sent using BlackBerry ----- Original Message ----- From: Andreas Krebbel <[email protected]> To: Linux on 390 Port <[email protected]>; [email protected] <[email protected]>; Waite, Dick Sent: Wed Apr 22 17:02:10 2009 Subject: Re: SLES11 - gcc 4.3.2 or 4.3.3 Hi, Waite, Dick wrote: > Grand Day, > > To those grand people running SLE11 on zLinux. I'm showing gcc > at 4.3.2, which means no support for the new z10 instructions and the > decimal goodies. I'm being told, SLE 11.0 was shipped with gcc 4.3.3 > which does have all the goodies... SuSE picked some version between GCC 4.3.3 and 4.3.2. The 4.3.x versions don't differ featurewise. The last part of the version number is only incremented for bugfix releases. SuSE was trying to pick up as much of the 4.3 bugfixes as possible so they have choosen to go with a GCC 4.3 branch snapshot from 10/22/2008. As you can see on gcc.gnu.org that's right in the middle of 4.3.2 (08/27/2008) and 4.3.3 (01/24/2009). gcc -v will tell you that it is a 4.3.2 but the truth lies somewhere in between. All the GCC DFP work you already get with a GCC 4.3.0 from gcc.gnu.org. This is basically what I've coded for the -march=z9-ec switch. The z10 support is upstream available with GCC 4.4.0 but we have provided SuSE with backported patches for their Sles 11 GCC. What is currently lacking in Sles 11 is the glibc support for DFP numbers (sw and hw). I did the S/390 libc pieces but these will not be shipped as part of glibc instead they will be integrated into a separate library (libdfp) to be included in Sles 11 SP1. In order to support DFP numbers with the standard IO functions (most importantly printf) it is necessary to hook into glibc. Thanks to the Power glibc team these hooks will be available with glibc version 2.10. Bye, -Andreas-
