[Qemu-devel] [PATCH] target-ppc: add Altivec instructions, patch-bomb version

[Nathan Froyd]

[Thiemo Seufer asked for a patch-bomb so people can conveniently comment
on things and so the mail archive has a record of Signed-off-by.]

This patch series adds support for integer Altivec instructions to QEMU,
including element-wise loads and stores.  It's a long patch series,
since each instruction "family" (element-wise loads/stores, modulo
arithmetic instructions, saturating arithmetic instructions, etc.) is
separated out into its own patch.  Hopefully since the individual
patches are so short, they will be more-or-less self-explanatory: the
explanation for the patches is generally fairly short, on the order of a
single line.

The patch series is slightly cleaned up from the one I originally
posted: there were a few problems with my tcg usage, and I didn't
faithfully use some convenience functions.

Why only the integer instructions?  I originally wrote support for the
whole instructions set, but I did it in the days of dyngen.  So a
straight forward-port was out of the question.  The original patch
sloppily used native floats everywhere, rather than the float32
abstraction.  It also used C99 math functions to implement some of the
more exotic Altivec instructions.  Both of these decisions mean that
some care has to be taken in porting the floating-point instructions.

I figured it'd be better to push out the integer instructions now and
the floating-point instructions later, rather than waiting for some
unspecified time for full support.

-Nathan