From owner-freebsd-hackers  Wed Apr 10 15:25:10 2002
Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Received: from PIKES.panasas.com (gw2.panasas.com [65.194.124.178])
	by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7799B37B423
	for <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>; Wed, 10 Apr 2002 15:24:23 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from localhost ([172.17.132.222]) by PIKES.panasas.com with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2653.13)
	id 214HFWZW; Wed, 10 Apr 2002 18:24:22 -0400
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 15:24:20 -0700
Subject: SSE bcopy
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed
Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v481)
Cc: dserenyi@panasas.com
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
From: Denis Serenyi <dserenyi@panasas.com>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Message-Id: <B3B2200B-4CD1-11D6-9B98-003065675568@panasas.com>
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.481)
Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Precedence: bulk
List-ID: <freebsd-hackers.FreeBSD.ORG>
List-Archive: <http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/> (Web Archive)
List-Help: <mailto:majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG?subject=help> (List Instructions)
List-Subscribe: <mailto:majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG?subject=subscribe%20freebsd-hackers>
List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG?subject=unsubscribe%20freebsd-hackers>
X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG

I've been looking at adding an SSE bcopy that runs at user-level to a 
program that I'm working on. I'm using FreeBSD 4.3 currently.

I wrote the routine, and when I execute it, I get an illegal instruction 
exception when I try to execute the first SSE instruction (movups).

After searching the hackers archives, I'm guessing that this is because 
FreeBSD 4.3 does not execute the instructions at boot time to enable SSE 
instructions to be executed, and also because FreeBSD 4.3 does not save 
the 128-bit SIMD registers on context switches.

Am I correct in this assessment?

It also seems like this support has been added to FreeBSD 4.5. Is this 
correct?

Assuming yes, in what release was SSE support added to FreeBSD? Has 
anyone done a patch that can be applied to FreeBSD 4.3, or are the 
changes non-trivial?

(considering that the machine-specific part of the context switch code 
is affected, I'd imagine the answer is that it is non trivial!).

please respond directly to me as I'm not on the mailing list.

Thanks!


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message