Is there a way to change the specs file so that it will pass -march=native if nothing is specified in command line?
Related things in the default specs file is:
*cc1:
%(cc1_cpu)
*cc1_cpu:
%{march=native:%>march=native %:local_cpu_detect(arch) %{!mtune=*:%>mtune=native %:local_cpu_detect(tune)}} %{mtune=native:%>mtune=native %:local_cpu_detect(tune)}
I am not sure how specs works. Simply specifying -march=native before or after %(cc1_cpu) doesn't work. However, this line does take effect because GCC will report error if I put -something_wierd instead of -march=native.
Another thing I noticed is if I put %{march=i386:-something_wierd} before %(cc1_cpu), gcc reports error so looks like -march=i386 is always passed in if nothing is specified, so is there a way to distinguish between nothing specified and -march=i386 in specs file?
BTW, what does %> do? Seems like it is not specified in the documentation.
I am using MinGW's gcc-4.6.2.
Referring to your last question: The gcc 4.6.1 sources (gcc/gcc.c) contain the following comment on %>:
%>S Similar to "%<S", but keep it in the GCC command line.
For the sake of completeness following the comment for %< form the same file:
%<S remove all occurrences of -S from the command line.
Note - this command is position dependent. % commands in the
spec string before this one will see -S, % commands in the
spec string after this one will not.
To answer the first question in short: yes, but ....
... the only generic solution I found has the significant drawback that the -march option will be ignored, so every build is done as if -march=native had been specified. Anyhow there is a workaround to that.
1 The solution (without workaround)
Create a specs-file called let's say specs.nativealways containing:
*cc1_cpu:
%<march=* -march=native %>march=native %:local_cpu_detect(arch) %{!mtune=*:%>mtune=native %:local_cpu_detect(tune)} %{mtune=native:%>mtune=native %:local_cpu_detect(tune)}
When using the specs-file (for example by invoking gcc with the option -specs=specs.nativealways) the build will be done as if -march=native was specified (with the mentioned drawback that any occurrence of option -march=<arch> would have simply been ignored).
2 The workaround
To still by able to override the newly configured default behavior one can use a modified version of the specs-file described above, introducing a new option called -myarch using the same syntax as -march (except for -myarch=native, which won't work, which does not metter as native now is the default).
The modfied specs-file looks like this:
*cc1_cpu:
%<march=* %{myarch=*:%<myarch* -march=%* ; :-march=native %>march=native %:local_cpu_detect(arch) %{!mtune=*:%>mtune=native %:local_cpu_detect(tune)}} %{mtune=native:%>mtune=native %:local_cpu_detect(tune)}
PS: This has been tested with with gcc 4.6.2 on Linux, but should work on MinGW.
While not a direct answer to your question, you can reach a very similar effect by defining CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS in your shell's initialization file. 99% of the Makefiles are sufficiently standard to pick up the environment values and pass the flags to gcc.
*cc1_cpu:
+ %{!march*:-march=native}
Related
Do note this is different from
Get the compiler options from a compiled executable? which I did go through in detail.
Although -frecord-gcc-switches is great, it only captures the command line arguments.
For example, I am not interested in capturing -O2 which is usually passed in command line. I am more curious about recording all the flags like -fauto-inc-dec which are enabled by -O2.
(In contrast to the link above, do note that I have access to the source, the compiler and the build infrastructure. I just want to capture the flags during compilation. Not picky about any specific gcc version)
You can try -fverbose-asm. That dumps the optimisation options used in a comment at the top of the assembly file.
I currently invoke clang or gcc as
cc -E -DPREPROCESSING ...
when debugging macros.
It has occurred to me that the define is redundant. Is there an expression I could write in the source to detect when the compiler will stop after preprocessing, and so drop this definition from my build scripts?
#if magic
#define PREPROCESSING
#ending
A look at the docs suggests not, but with luck I'm missing something.
Whatever solution you come up with is going to be compiler-specific, since the C standard does not have anything to say about separate preprocessing.
In gcc, you could implement the magic by adding a custom spec file:
%rename cpp old_cpp
*cpp:
%{E:-DPREPROCESSING} %(old_cpp)
You would need to tell gcc to use this spec file (-specs=/path/to/specfile), unless you compiled your own gcc with the above definition added to the built-in cpp spec. If you are using a Makefile, you could add the -specs option above to your CFLAGS.
(I should add that I don't think this is a particularly good idea. But it is possible.)
I'm working on setting up autotools for a large code base that was once just a bash script compile and later just hand written Makefiles.
We have a set of files that require that compiler optimizations be turned off. These files are already in their own subdirectory, so they will have their own Makefile.am.
What's the proper way to drop any existing compiler optimizations and force a -O0 flag on the compiler for these specific files?
I went with Brett Hale's comment to use subpackages. I was able to insert
: ${CFLAGS="-O0"}
before AC_PROG_CC, which sets the appropriate optimization. The other solutions do not work, since the -g -O2 was getting added very last. You can never get another -O variable after it.
You don't have to remove existing optimizations: the last value of -O on the compiler invocation will be used, so it's good enough to just add -O0 at the end.
This is not directly supported by automake, but there's a trick you can use defined in the documentation.
Otherwise if you know you'll only ever invoke your makefile with GNU make you can play other tricks that are GNU make specific; you may have to disable automake warnings about non-portable content.
I have seen makefiles use the -DLINUX flag but can't find any documentation on it.
Is there a place to find information on tools like 'gcc' that are more up-to-date than
the officially released manuals?
It just defines the LINUX symbol for the C preprocessor.
Probably there are pieces of the code that look like:
#ifdef LINUX
//Linux-specific code
#elif defined WINDOWS
//Windows-specific code
#endif
It's the -D option controlling the preprocessor. It defines the LINUX macro, that you can then use with #ifdef.
According to man gcc:
-D name
Predefine name as a macro, with definition 1.
Hence, it let define a constant from the compilation command line.
It defines a preprocessor macro named LINUX. That's it. The macro itself, LINUX, is not a predefined one, it's probably used for a cross-platform codebase where specific sections of code are enabled for a Linux target. For this purpose, one could actually have re-used the predefined linux or __linux__ ones (see the output of gcc -dP -E - < /dev/null to get all the predefined macros on your system).
See http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.8.2/gcc/ for the standard documentation on gcc (that's obviously for GCC 4.8.2). To my knowledge, that's the best place to look for if this documentation is not already installed (or up-to-date) on your system.
I'd be curious to understand if there's any substantial difference in specifying libraries (both shared and static) to gcc/g++ in the two following ways (CC can be g++ or gcc)
CC -o output_executable /path/to/my/libstatic.a /path/to/my/libshared.so source1.cpp source2.cpp ... sourceN.cpp
vs
CC -o output_executable -L/path/to/my/libs -lstatic -lshared source1.cpp source2.cpp ... sourceN.cpp
I can only see a major difference being that passing directly the fully-specified library name would make for a greater control in choosing static or dynamic versions, but I suspect there's something else going on that can have side effects on how the executable is built or will behave at runtime, am I right?
Andrea.
Ok, I can answer myself basing on some experiments and a deeper reading of gcc documentation:
From gcc documentation: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Link-Options.html
[...] The linker handles an archive file by scanning through it for members which define symbols that have so far been referenced but not defined. But if the file that is found is an ordinary object file, it is linked in the usual fashion. The only difference between using an -l option and specifying a file name is that -l surrounds library with lib' and.a' and searches several directories
This actually answers also to the related doubt about the 3rd option of directly specifying object files on the gcc command line (i.e. in that case all the code in the object files will become part of the final executable, while using archives, only the object files that are really needed will be pulled in).