[x264-devel] Please add support for non-AltiVec PowerPCs

[Ancoron Luciferis]

Hi *,

this is my second attempt to get some attention for the situation I have.

I just wanted to cross-compile the x264 for use at my small NAS here at
home (Synology DS-409+). It has a PowerPC CPU without the altivec
extensions. But as far as I can see the code altivec seems to be
required as it is assumed in almost every place.

E.g. the configure script:

>  powerpc|powerpc64)
>    ARCH="PPC"
>    if [ $SYS = MACOSX ]
>    then
>      CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -faltivec -fastf -mcpu=G4"
>    else
>      CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -maltivec -mabi=altivec -DHAVE_ALTIVEC_H"
>    fi
>    ;;

When compiled directly on that box the following shows up (modified the
configure script to show error output from cc_check function):

> + echo int main () {  return 0; }
> + gcc conftest.c -Wall -I. -DHAVE_MALLOC_H -maltivec -mabi=altivec
>   -DHAVE_ALTIVEC_H -lm -o conftest
> conftest.c:1: error: AltiVec and E500 instructions cannot coexist
> + die No working C compiler found.

The CPU is a Freescale MPC8533 and has one e500v2 core at 1.067 GHz. So
the next thing I tried was to remove the alitvec flags and see what happens:

> gcc -O4 -ffast-math  -Wall -I. -DHAVE_MALLOC_H -DARCH_PPC \
>   -DSYS_LINUX -DWORDS_BIGENDIAN -DHAVE_PTHREAD -fPIC -s \
>   -fomit-frame-pointer   -c -o common/ppc/mc.o common/ppc/mc.c
> In file included from common/ppc/mc.c:34:
> common/ppc/ppccommon.h:46: error: syntax error before "vector"
> common/ppc/ppccommon.h:46: warning: no semicolon at end of \
>   struct or union
> common/ppc/ppccommon.h:47: warning: type defaults to `int' \
>   in declaration of `vec_u32_u'
> common/ppc/ppccommon.h:47: warning: data definition has no \
>   type or storage class
> common/ppc/ppccommon.h:51: error: syntax error before "vector"
> common/ppc/ppccommon.h:51: warning: no semicolon at end of \
>   struct or union
> common/ppc/ppccommon.h:52: warning: type defaults to `int' \
>   in declaration of `vec_u16_u'
> ...

OK, no altivec.h included = no vector. But why is it assumed that every
PowerPC based things also supports AltiVec? Why is there no fallback
available?


Thanx,

Ancoron