On Wed, Mar 08, 2017 at 04:06:17PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote: > The firefox package is built with AltiVec enabled and so is mplayer, > for example. So, yes, Altivec is actively used and I would honestly > refrain from disabling it in a performance-sensitive package like > babl. > > Altivec is disabled on powerpcspe where it's not available in the > hardware, but most machines on which people install Debian powerpc > should have Altivec.
e5500 does not have it, which means one of the modern powerpc chips doesn't support it. Certainly the powerpc64 port claims e5500 support, and hence does NOT assume altivec support. It really is something that should be runtime detected and used if present but not required. -- Len Sorensen
