There is a large installed based of V7/V8 Sparc devices,
and it is in fact growing. This is because of the
adoption of the LEON SPARC V8 processor, which is used
in a growing number of embedded devices. As an example,
the Nemerix NJ1030A GPS receiver contains a LEON SPARC
cpu and was shipped in 1.5 million pieces in 2005 alone.
Other LEON products include the Infrant Network Storage
Processor (IT3102/IT3107) and the ATMEL AT697.
I would therefore suggest that the gcc defaults for
sparc-elf and sparc-linux stays as is (V7) while the
solaris 10+ can safely be modified to V9.
Jiri.
Ralf Corsepius wrote:
On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 20:10 -0800, Alexey Starovoytov wrote:
Hi,
The default architecture for GCC SPARC is V7.
What do gcc sparc developers think about changing it to V8PLUS?
Few things to consider:
- v7 is legacy
. used in old Sun's sun4c systems
. 32-bit only
. no integer mul/div insns
AFAICT, v7's are still in use in embedded platforms.
1st choice (the best):
- change the default for all sparc platforms
This is likely to break toolchains targetting embedded targets. I am
almost 100% sure it would break sparc-rtems).
2nd:
- change the default for Solaris 7+ and linux
3rd (100% safe):
- change the default for Solaris 10+
Also 64-bit Linux doesn't have to mean 64-bit (v9) gcc compiler,
so at the same time it would be good to change it to v8plus as well.
All that changes can be done by easily tweaking gcc/config.gcc
by adding with_cpu=v9
I don't have an opinion on Solaris or Linux.
Ralf
.
