Handling packages with SSE extensions

[Nils Philippsen]

On Wed, 2005-08-17 at 10:41 -0500, Quentin Spencer wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I'm working on a package for ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra 
> Subsystem). On i386, it can use SSE, SSE2 and 3Dnow. How are programs 
> handled that use these extensions? Are there other packages that would 
> make good references? I have gmp installed on my system, and I see that 
> there are libs with identical names in /usr/lib and /usr/lib/sse2. Is 
> this the standard way of dealing with this? How does the system load the 
> correct libraries? How does rpm/yum deal with choosing what to install?

Ideally the package should do what gimp does: have codepaths for all
optimization levels (i.e. nothing, mmx, sse, ...) in the binary and
dynamically select the best one for the machine it's running on. Then a
single package (or library) is sufficient.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
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