Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl>
> > It might be also good to make a "sse2-support" package as mentioned in > > the thread Gert linked to to reduce duplication of such detection logic. > > Please say so if you think this is a good idea. > > Saying "so". :-) * Package name : sse-support Upstream Author : me Binaries : sse2-support, sse3-support, more? Description : prevent installation on processors without required support This is a mostly dummy package, whose only purpose is to detect the presence of ${binary%%-support}. It refuses to install on inadequate processors, thus allowing specifying such a requirement as a dependency. Detection is done via a "boom instruction" rather than grep /proc/cpuinfo, because of qemu and /proc-less chroots. On failure, preinst complains via debconf and on stderr then dies. I wonder which other extensions would be wanted -- sse4.2? More? Note that in general you're not supposed to unconditionally use opcodes not supported by the baseline ISA, but in some cases adding generic code paths would be either too much work or outright useless. I for one just failed to obtain access to a pre-sse2 machine despite raiding quite a few places; thus it's understandable no one bothers to port scientific software to such museal machines. I'm afraid it's too late to use this for 686, though.