Subject: Re: [PATCH Linux] powerpc: add documentation for HWCAPs

From: Segher Boessenkool <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 09:35:54 -0500

On Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 11:17:24AM +1000, Nicholas Piggin wrote:
> Excerpts from Segher Boessenkool's message of May 25, 2022 4:32 am:
> > Linux runs on ISA 1.xx and ISA 2.01 machines still.  "Category" wasn't
> > invented for either yet either, but similar concepts did exist of
> > course.
> 
> Not sure what to say about this. It now also has "Compliancy Subset"
> although maybe that's more like a set of features rather than
> incompatible features or modes such as some of the category stuff
> seems to be. I'll try add something.

The compliancy subset stuff is an attempt to simplify things again.
In most cases you want to require a whole swath of feature at once,
if you really try to support fine-grained optional features you need to
test thousands of configurations, while you really can test only ten
(if you are lucky!)

Maybe it is best to just be a bit vague here?

Segher