Bug#701561: Please test ioquake3 on PowerPC, particularly without Altivec

[Hiroyuki Yamamoto]

Hi,

I'm a porter of ppc64 port.

Unluckyly, ppc64 buildd nodes and my machines are shifting of place,
and they are offline now.
(If no trouble, plobably they will revive to online
on 2013-06-16.)

So, this build test cannot be done now,
but on ppc64 port, the packages have been tested
to be built packages with Altivec option as default,
unless package maintainers specify build options.

If buildlogs till now are helpful, please refer to them.
http://buildd.debian-ports.org/status/logs.php?pkg=ioquake3&arch=ppc64

Regards,
--
Hiroyuki Yamamoto

(2013/06/04 23:37), thinkbrown at gmail.com wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 4, 2013 at 9:58 AM, Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:
>> On 04/06/13 13:58, thinkbrown at gmail.com wrote:
>>> One thing I'd suggest is that
>>> altivec is enabled based on the CPU itself, and not just PPC vs PPC64.
>>
>> Sorry, I'm not going to do significant development on this myself, but
>> if you or another powerpc porter want to put a patchset together,
>> upstream would probably take it.  There seems to be some support for
>> runtime detection already, but AIUI, compiling the whole thing with
>> -maltivec means that's useless, because gcc is within its rights to emit
>> Altivec instructions anyway?
>>
>> Another possibility would be to have a separate "lowest common
>> denominator" Q3 binary for PowerPC-without-Altivec, and have it
>> transparently exec the Altivec binary (with the same command line) if it
>> determines that we do actually have Altivec. It would probably need to
>> behave like its own mini-architecture within the Quake 3 engine, with a
>> separate suffix or directory for loadable modules (perhaps *ppc.so for
>> Altivec and *oldppc.so for non-Altivec?)
>>
>> What I'm more concerned about is whether the PowerPC JIT for the Quake 3
>> bytecode language (code/qcommon/vm_powerpc*) emits Altivec opcodes - I
>> have no idea how I'd determine that. That's why I'm specifically asking
>> for testing with the bytecode game logic.
>
> I did some tinkering with runtime detection when I was working on
> getting PPC64 support under Quake II, so I'll see if I can make
> something work. Maybe  *ppcaltivec.so, *ppc.so, and *ppc64.so
>
>>
>>> Is Rage128 still a supported 3D accelerator? I know it'll be slow as
>>> heck, but it's the only card I have for my PowerMac G3s.
>>
>> Your guess is as good as mine :-)
>>
>> If all G3s are likely to be this low-spec, perhaps ioquake3/powerpc
>> should just continue to require Altivec, and put a note in xmessage(1)
>> on older machines...
>
> Yeah, for the most part, non-altivec PPC/PPCSPE machines are probably
> going to be incapable of running Quake III at a reasonable speed.
> AFAIK, the highest end PCI card that there's a Macintosh ROM for is
> the Radeon 7000.
>
>
> I'll see if I can get a build machine up later today, since actually
> compiling on a G3 would be exceptionally slow.
>
>
> Logan
>
>


-- 
Hiroyuki Yamamoto