There really two questions here. Will/can Fedora automatically take advantage of new instruction set architecture (ISA). And can my project take advantage to new ISA.
The short answer is yes/maybe. The longer answer is the mechanisms exist (built into the compilers and runtime), but not all projects and packages take advantage of these mechanisms (For example dynamic libraries can use platform based library search or STTGNUIFUNC symbol type extension), and. The Kernel and GLIBC usually do. This requires the platform maintainers to do extra work. I don't think either is commonly used for general library packages. The distro/kernel/runtime/community will decide on a "base platform ISA level" For PowerPC64le that is POWER8 (PowerISA-2.07B). This includes VMX/VSX but not the POWER9 extensions like Float128 hardware FP. See: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC Of course the the distro (will/should) install on newer processors (like POWER9) which has a larger ISA (more instructions). The Linux kernel notified each process of the Platform and Hardware Capabilities it the AUX Vector (Defined in the Application Binary Interface Document for each platform). The compilers provide a easy to use interface to interrogate this: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-9.3.0/gcc/Basic-PowerPC-Built-in-Functions-Available-on-all-Configurations.html#Basic-PowerPC-Built-in-Functions-Available-on-all-Configurations. Similarly for x86. This is the mechanism that the dynamic linker / runtime use to select the best implementation (of for example memcpy or cosf128) based on the platform (POWER8 vs POWER9). This CAN be used by any project/package. I am working on documenting this (implementing dynamic IFUNC selection for platform specific optimizations) as part of the PVECLIB project. If interested send me a note. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
