patch to add AES intrinsics to gcc

Nathan Whitehorn nwhitehorn at freebsd.org
Fri Aug 23 12:34:18 UTC 2013


On 08/23/13 07:26, Andriy Gapon wrote:
> on 23/08/2013 14:06 David Chisnall said the following:
>> Our gcc is from 2007.  It has no C11, no C++11 support.  It has bugs in its
>> atomic generation so you can't use it sensibly without lots of inline
>> assembly (which it doesn't support for newer architectures) for
>> multithreaded things.
>>
>> Our libstdc++ is ancient and doesn't work with modern C++ codebases.
> On the other hand these tools are perfect for building FreeBSD kernel and base.
> Extrapolating my experience with base GCC I am very confident in it as a
> FreeBSD development tool.
> Extrapolating my experience with Clang I am not yet confident in it as a
> FreeBSD development tool.
>

This isn't even true. As CPUs gain new features, the set of available 
intrinsics gets more and more ancient, requiring ever more patching, 
workarounds, and #ifdef. Just look at the original subject of this thread!

We're just talking about the default of a make.conf setting here. 
Switching to clang is a long-term goal of the project for good reason. 
Other vendors (Apple, for instance) have made the plunge first. This 
seems like as good a time as any to do it. And if it goes wrong somehow, 
we have lots of BETAs and it is trivial to change back at any time.
-Nathan


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