geode-optimized glibc routines

[Marcelo Tosatti]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 06:00:07PM -0400, Andres Salomon wrote:
> Hi Rob,
> 
> Regarding
> http://mailman.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/2007-January/003562.html, I'm
> curious if there's been any progress on this.  I'm quite interested to
> see what kind of overall performance gains we get with it.

I did some testing by replacing the current glibc string functions we
use with the Geode optimized ones, and the results are good:

http://dev.laptop.org/~marcelo/glibcperf/optimizations.html

Hard part of this is to get it merged upstream. As far as I can grasp,
there is no framework on glibc for providing optimized string functions
for given x86 processors versions.

I heard John Zulauf tried to merge those patches when he first wrote
them, but conversation with Ulrich was not very productive. I'm unaware
of the technical details.

We could ship those in our glibc based RPM, but I don't know about
acceptance from the Fedora maintainers (Ulrich?).

In essence we need to either spend sometime to build up knowledge to do
the task internally and/or or ask real glibc people to help us with it.