[Debian-coldfire-devel] Progress?

[Adam Conrad]

Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 08:17:44AM +1000, Adam Conrad wrote:
> 
>> In the other direction, however, it's more worth having the kernel
>> emulate older m68k opcodes that the ColdFire can't support, since the
>> ColdFire is clearly fast enough to pull that off.
> 
> I still think that producing code which needs no emulation on either
> hardware is a better way to go. Remember that apart from the above, the
> coldfire ISA is a subset of the classic m68k one.

Having binutils not spit out the old opcodes is fine by me (assuming
this doesn't shaft the Amiga users and make their systems noticeably
slower), but we still want/need kernel emulation to get the ColdFires
running all our old binaries without having to rebuild the whole archive
with the new toolchain, something I'd really prefer not to do.

As for the NEW opcodes, handling those with hwcap (rather than refusing
to generate them at all) sounds like the Right Thing To Do, so we can
take advantage of the beefier vector math for hand-tuning libssl and
other such tricks.  (Heck, given the sorts of hand-held media devices
I've seen using ColdFire CPUs, I'm sure that mplayer could benefit from
some hand-tuning on m68k/CF to the point where it would rock pretty hard)

... Adam