Re: GNAT GPL 2016 on Debian Jessie

[rieachus@comcast.net]

On Monday, July 11, 2016 at 10:50:24 AM UTC-4, Simon Wright wrote:
> I have 64-bit Debian Jessie (running under VMware Fusion).

I don't quite understand your problem.  If you feel that GCC should have registered your compiler under one of hundreds of obsolete machine architectures, Waah!  x86-64 is a superset of i686, and a boatload of other architectures.

If you really want to generate i686 code, -march=i686 and usually -mtune=i686 as well should do the trick.  -march=native and -mtune=native will generate code for the specific machine hardware you are running on.  (I haven't tested what you get when you run on a virtual machine.)  I also haven't checked on how to run strict x86 (286 or earlier) code on x86-64 machines.  Normally OSes today will run code in (per compilation unit) either long (64-bit) mode or compatibility (32-bit) mode.  But no compiler should be generating the deprecated instructions that were eliminated from the -x86 instruction set to allow 64-bit addressing in 32-bit mode.  The instructions were deprecated precisely because most compilers generated more efficient code, and no compiler should be generating them today (or for that matter, in this century. ;-)