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On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 11:01 PM, Luca Barbato <lu_zero@g.o> wrote: |
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> BTW is pathscale ready to be used as system compiler as well? |
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I wish, but no. We have known issues when building grub2, glibc and |
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the Linux kernel at the very least. Someone* did report a long time |
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ago that with their unofficial port, were able to build/boot the |
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NetBSD kernel. |
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(*A community dev we trusted with our sources and was helping us with |
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portability across platforms) |
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The stuff with grub2 may potentially be fixed in the "near" future... |
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the others are more tricky. In general if clang can do it, we have a |
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strong chance as well. |
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As a philosophy - "we" aren't really trying to be the best generic |
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compiler in the world. We aim more on optimizing as much for known |
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targets. So if by system you mean, a compiler that would produce an |
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"OS" which only runs on a single class of hardware, then yeah it could |
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work at some point in the future. Specifically, on x86 we default on |
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host CPU optimizations. So on newer Intel hardware it's easy to get a |
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binary that won't run on AMD or older 64bit Intel. |
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More recently on ARMv8 - we turn on processor specific tuning. So |
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while it may "run", the difference between APM's mustang and Cavium |
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ThunderX is pretty big and running binaries intended for A and ran on |
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B would certainly take a hit.. (this is just the tip of the iceberg) |
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For general scalar OS code it isn't likely to matter... the real |
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impact being like 1-10% difference (being very general.. it could be |
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less or more in the real world..) |
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For HPC codes or anything where you get loops or computationally |
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complex - the gloves are off and I could see big differences... (again |
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being general and maybe a bit dramatic for fun) |
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