The following reply was made to PR pkg/35230; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Brownlee <abs@NetBSD.org>
To: Dan McMahill <dmcmahill@NetBSD.org>
Cc: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org, pkgsrc-bugs@netbsd.org,
	gnats-admin@netbsd.org
Subject: Re: pkg/35230 (devel/cpuflags assumes gcc)
Date: Thu, 14 Dec 2006 23:11:52 +0000 (GMT)

  	Annoyingly it looks like sunpro has an xtarget option for sparc
  	that should do exactly what we want:
 
            native    Set the parameters for the best performance
                      on the host environment. The compiler chooses
                      the appropriate setting for producing 32-bit
                      binaries for the system on which the proces-
                      sor is running.
 
            native64  Set the parameters for the best performance
                      on the 64-bit host environment. The compiler
                      chooses the appropriate setting for producing
                      64-bit binaries for the system on which the
                      processor is running.
 
  	but the one for x86 is somewhat lacking in comparison:
 
            native    Compile for good performance on this system.
                      This option uses the best instruction set for
                      good performance on most processors without
                      major performance degradation on any of them.
                      With each new release, the definition of
                      "best" instruction set may be adjusted, if
                      appropriate.
 
  	I'd be curious to see what '-xdryrun -xtarget=native' reported
  	on your system or systems.
 
  	The other interesting questions are:
  	- how do you determine if your Solaris system is 32bit or 64bit
  	- For sparc, xtarget has a massive set of possible system names, but
  	  how can we extract the current system name (and possibly, is it
  	  even needed given -xtarget=native
  	- For x86, how can we tell if we are opteron, p4, p3, or below
 
 -- 
  		David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --