We have a problem finding and maintaining machines old enough to not have SSE3, etc., so that we can reliably build Sage binaries that don't rely on SSE3.
Evidently, vmware lets you mask CPUID results, to hide particular CPU features from the guest: http://pubs.vmware.com/vi3/bsa/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=bsa&file=c11changevm.html.html Maybe we could use that as an easy way to be able to build no-SSE3 binaries. I see two problems with the idea: 1) it's poorly documented; somebody would have to figure out which bits to flip in the cpuid results. 2) I'm guessing this doesn't actually disable the feature. If any part of Sage does SSE3 detection by trying to run SSE3 code and seeing if it crashes (instead of using the cpuid instruction), then the technique would fail. Carl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
