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Date:      Fri, 27 Apr 2001 21:06:45 -0400
From:      Graywane <graywane@home.com>
To:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Trouble with 4.3-RELEASE compiler
Message-ID:  <20010427210644.A1197@home.com>
In-Reply-To: <200104280035.UAA11427@ns1.rwwa.com>; from witr@rwwa.com on Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 08:38:30PM -0400
References:  <20010427155725.L18676@fw.wintelcom.net> <200104280035.UAA11427@ns1.rwwa.com>

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On Fri, Apr 27, 2001 at 08:38:30PM -0400, User Witr wrote:
> Out of curiosity, how much potential performance is FreeBSD throwing
> away by banning -O2 and -O3?  To my naive eyes it would seem better
> to light that candle (try fix the -O2 bug) than curse the darkness.
> Assuming there is significant performance gain and there truly is only
> one major -O2 bug.  -O2 used to be considered "safe" didn't it?

The strength reduce "bug" has been present in gcc as far back as the 2.7
series. Every time they "fix" this "bug" they only end up subtly changing
the program that demonstrates the problem. The problem is that it is hard to
code a strength reduce optimization on platforms with small register sets
(such as the Intel platform). Having very few people truly understand the
optimization code while trying to support numerous platforms only
exacerbates the problem. Try browsing the gcc code and you will see what I
mean. If it were easy to fix then it would have been fixed many years ago.

I have been bitten by the bug several times myself both in code I wrote and
in other people code. One ftp program I compiled about a year ago would only
crash if compiled with -fstrength-reduce (or any optimization level which
included it -- like -O2).

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