http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=48347
--- Comment #2 from Norman Goldstein <normvcr at telus dot net> 2011-03-30 00:16:54 UTC --- I installed and built the source RPM mediatomb-0.12.1-5.fc14.src.rpm, using the default compile flags, -g -O2, and this is fine, except that debugging was difficult, so I rebuilt using only -g. This is when the assembler complained: Quote: ../src/zmm/atomic.h: Assembler messages: ../src/zmm/atomic.h:81: Error: bad register name `%sil' Line 81 in atomic.h is the inline asm statement: Code: static inline bool atomic_dec(mt_atomic_t *at) { unsigned char c; __asm__ __volatile__( ASM_LOCK "decl %0; sete %1" :"=m" (at->x), "=g" (c) :"m" (at->x) :"cc" ); return (c!=0); } I edited the compile command, replacing, -c with -S, and .o with .asm, to take a look at the generated assembler code. Here is the relevant snippet: Code: # 81 "../src/zmm/atomic.h" 1 lock; decl (%eax); sete %sil Sure enough, the gcc inline module inserted a reference to the "%sil" register, which is not part of the x86 32-bit architecture. The only difference on the command line was the absence of the "-O2" flag. I did some more experimenting, and found that "-O1" produces proper code. Then I did a compile replacing "-O1" with all the implied optimization flags, but the .asm file had the improper reference to "%sil" ! The gcc documentation does explain that "-On" is not exactly equivalent to using the implied flags, and I guess that my experience, here, corroborates this.