Description of problem: Glibc includes the power6/power6x cpu-addon libraries, which are tuned for power6 processors. That is great. However, most of Fedora's PPC64 userbase would be based on the PPC970 processor. That is used in all of the G5 based Apple machines, as well as JS20/JS21 IBM blades. Would it be possible to build the ppc970 tuned libraries in addition to power6/power6x? I believe this would benefit the majority of Fedora PowerPC users.
As a side note, it seems when building for power6 you build some kind of emulation library if you aren't running on a power6 machine. Couldn't you avoid that by using cross-compiling=yes?
No, already the power6 optimized ones double the build and testing time, adding some other variant is just not a good idea. cross-compiling=yes is a bad idea, glibc with the few small hacks to avoid using the newly built ld.so during building builds just fine for power6 even on pre-power6 CPUs. The emul hack is there just so that it can be somewhat tested with make check even on earlier CPUs (though that works only on Altivec capable CPUs, unfortunately koji build boxes don't have even that and I really don't want to write altivec emulator).
Hm. I understand the reluctance to extending build and test time for official releases. It's unfortunate that we can't build for the majority of the desktop machines out there though. Would you take a patch that adds conditional building (similar to power6) for 970 with the default being disabled? Also, the koji builders should be switching to ppc970 blades soon as the bladecenter is phased in.