Geode LX Optimizations?

[Brandon Black]

Hi,

  I'm playing with a Geode LX -based board for a small Linux-based
home router/voip box (Soekris net5501).  I'm hand-rolling a variant of
Ubuntu 7.10 onto a CF card at the moment while I play around with the
thing and decide how I'm going to configure it.  I can get the thing
up and running pretty well with a tuned configuration of the vanilla
2.6.23.1 kernel (I haven't yet checked to see if any of the geode
kernel patches in the dev.laptop.org repo are not applied in 2.6.23.1,
but it would be easy to apply them if not).  What I'm looking at now
is the gcc/glibc optimization work.

  It looks like the gcc changes to support -march=geode are in the 4.3
dev branch, so I can probably build that and use it (assuming I don't
run into any serious regressions there) to do optimized builds of
kernel, glibc, openssl, asterisk, and any performance-important
asterisk deps (codecs, etc).  I'm having a little trouble making sense
of the geode-perf work on glibc, not being a glibc hacker.  Has anyone
yet either pushed this upstream (I couldn't find references to it in
glibc cvs) or come up with a relatively simple patching process
against glibc 2.6.1 (or higher) to apply the geode optimization work?

  On the assumption that the geode-perf git repo is about as
user-friendly as it gets, anyone have some pointers on applying the
work manually?  I'm comfortable with patching things up, I have some
good C/perl/sh skills, I'm just not at all familiar with the glibc
source and build tools.

  If I can get this going, I'm planning to roll all of this effort up
into some debian packages others can use (at least on gutsy-based
installs).

  Of course, if there's an easier answer, like "Distro X already has
geode-specific patches applied to everything", and the distro has some
reasonable mechanism for bootstrapping into a smaller device (under
Ubuntu, I'm using debootstrap to put a minimal install into a chroot
environment, building stuff inside there, then rsyncing it to the CF
card to try it on the hardware), I'm all for that solution too.

I'm not subscribed yet, please CC me :)

Thanks,
-- Brandon