Two presents from AMD...

[Jim Gettys]

1) the VSA source code is now in Git: thanks to Jordan for bird-dogging
this. http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=geode-vsa;a=summary Many of you know
this, but for those that don't: the VSA code can only be built currently
using very obsolete and no longer commercially available versions of
various Windows compilers and other tools.  But it does mean you can see
how it works, and we know that if we really had to, we could fix
problems.

2) A test framework and some specific implementations of high use
routines (e.g. strcmp, memcopy, and the like), implemented by John
Zulauf.  These need to be rerun on our boards to see if John's initial
results are correct, and where appropriate, integrated into glibc or
other appropriate places; I believe John did most of this work on an LX,
but the GX and LX are similar in most areas.  I feel the test framework
is as valuable as the specific routines that John worked on optimizing.

Current work includes:

      * Memcmp performance test -- improved 1.47x
      * Memcpy performance test -- improved 1.24x
      * Memset performance test -- improved 1.1x
      * Strcmp performance test -- improved 2.32x
      * strcpy performance test -- improved 1.65x
      * Strlen performance test -- improved 1.2x

Note that I checked the whole kit and caboodle into git, including
doxygen generated html files; it would be good if someone got this
properly set up on a web server on laptop.org and took it as a personal
crusade.
                                  - Jim

-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child