and POWER8. This instruction set unifies the 32 64-bit scalar floating
point registers with the 32 128-bit vector registers into a single bank
of 64 128-bit registers. Kernel support mostly amounts to saving and
restoring the wider version of the floating point registers and making
sure that both scalar FP and vector registers are enabled once a VSX
instruction is executed. get_mcontext() and friends currently cannot
see the high bits, which will require a little more work.
As the system compiler (GCC 4.2) does not support VSX, making use of this
from userland requires either newer GCC or clang.
Relnotes: yes
Sponsored by: FreeBSD Foundation
it never did -- and fix an obvious missing line. Floating point emulation
on Book-E still needs some work but this gets it basically functional on
soft-FPU systems (hard FPU for Book-E is not yet implemented).
MFC after: 1 week
can run on processors that don't have a FPU. This is typically the
case for Book E processors. While a tuned system will probably want
to use soft-float (or use a processor that has a FPU if the usage is
FP intensive enough), allowing hard-float on FPU-less systems gives
great portability and flexibility.
Obtained from: NetBSD
