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Message-ID: <20160311155529.GX9349@brightrain.aerifal.cx> Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2016 10:55:30 -0500 From: Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> To: musl@...ts.openwall.com Subject: Re: long double on powerpc64 On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 02:04:35PM +0100, Szabolcs Nagy wrote: > * Justin Cormack <justin@...cialbusservice.com> [2016-03-11 11:19:22 +0000]: > > On 11 March 2016 at 04:17, Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org> wrote: > > > On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 09:16:36PM -0600, Bobby Bingham wrote: > > >> I've been working on a PPC64 port of musl lately. I've made some good > > >> progress, and it's time to decide what to do about the long double type. > > >> > > >> The PPC64 ELFv2 ABI [1] calls for a 128 bit long double. It allows an > > >> implementation to choose to use either IEEE quad, or IBM double double, > > >> with IEEE quad being preferred. > > >> > > >> On the compiler side, it looks like things are a bit of a mess. > > >> > > >> Clang only supports IBM double double on PPC64, AFAICS, and therefore > > >> won't work for us currently. > > >> > > >> GCC support is more complicated. It supports both 128 bit variants, as > > >> well as supporting (and defaulting to) a 64 bit long double. To get a > > >> 128 bit long double, you must build gcc with --with-long-double-128 or > > >> pass -mlong-double-128, and even then you get IBM double double. To get > > >> IEEE quad, you must additionally pass -mlong-double-128, though there > > >> are whispers that the default may change in gcc 7 [2]. > > >> > > >> The final piece of bad news is that gcc can't successfully build musl on > > >> PPC64 with IEEE quad long double. It chokes on even trivial code using > > >> long double complex [3]. So only 64 bit long double is usable for now. > > >> > > >> The good news is that gcc's predefined macros are sufficient to detect > > >> which long double variant is in use. My current thinking is that we can > > >> support both 64 bit long and IEEE quad as two powerpc64 subarchs, even > > >> if we can only implement 64 bit for now. Because it looks like the > > >> future direction is for IEEE quad to become the default, I think that > > >> should be the suffix-less subarch, and the 64 bit long double subarch > > >> should have a -ld64 suffix or similar. > > > > > > My leaning would be to just go with ld64 if nobody has their act > > > together for quad support, but let's see what people who want to use > > > powerpc64 think about it. The only option that's not on the table is > > > IBM double-double (because it's incompatible with musl's assumption of > > > IEEE semantics; math-savvy people in the musl community already know > > > this of course but I'm repeating it for the sake of possible > > > newcomers). > > > > I think it would be a mistake to only support ld64, I think Bobby's approach > > of two architectures is probably better, and maybe look to retire ld64 > > eventually. > > if long double is 64bit then the 128bit hw floats cannot be used > with musl, because we don't want library support for __float128. I don't follow. Are you saying we would not want quad if it requires soft float? I think the idea here is that the baseline binaries that work on all models would need to use soft float operations for long double, but higher -march could use the hardware directly in the future (and the soft support should correctly use the fenv from hardware). That's the same as the situation for aarch64, no? > note that the glibc position is that for __float128 support the > minimum required gcc version has to change to gcc-7 because it is > abi and libc needs complex support (which will not be in gcc-6 yet). > https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2015-12/msg02222.html > https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2016-03/msg00193.html Support for __float128 is separate from support for targets where long double is IEEE quad, I think. The former is not interesting IMO. > the problem with -ld64 suffix is that gcc-6 already has hardcoded > dynamic linker names (i don't think we can change that now, before > the gcc-6 release). > > so i'd leave the dynlinker name as is, use 64bit ld for now and > rediscuss the issue when ieee128 long double works in gcc-7 Any idea why IEEE quad support requires bleeding-edge gcc for some targets when mips64 had it way back in gcc 4.2 or earlier? Rich
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