questions about 8.0-RELEASE

[Nathan Whitehorn]

Horst Günther Burkhardt III wrote:
> Ok.
>
> So, I heard it on the 'tubes that 8.0 is in BETA atm, and will rock
> pretty damned hard. 
>
> But, I have a few questions, being a PowerPC user, and also having some
> disappointment with the state of things in 7.2 especially on this
> platform. 
>
> First, has libm finally had the log2 functions defined in the C99 spec
> added? (this is an issue dating back to 2005, standards/83845 )
>   
As far as I know, no. Many of the complex functions (e.g. cexp) aren't 
implemented either, which can be a huge pain.
> Second, I'm aware that altivec support is implemented in -CURRENT, as of
> some months ago, will this be stable enough for release? 
There was Altivec in 7.2-RELEASE as well, and it is quite stable. Ports 
that know about it will use it by themselves, or you can define 
something like CPUTYPE=7450 in make.conf to have the compiler try to 
autovectorize things.

8.0 has a bunch of other new PowerPC features like audio, SMP, G5 
support, ATA DMA, ADB keyboard and mouse support, some basic power 
management, including cpufreq, etc. Hopefully it will be a better 
experience than 7.2 -- the big architectural differences between 8.0 
PowerPC and 7.0 PowerPC have made it difficult to MFC things for some time.
-Nathan