From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Apr 11 6:43:18 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from duke.cs.duke.edu (duke.cs.duke.edu [152.3.140.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3CBFB37B404 for ; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 06:43:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (grasshopper.cs.duke.edu [152.3.145.30]) by duke.cs.duke.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA05196; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 09:43:12 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from gallatin@localhost) by grasshopper.cs.duke.edu (8.11.6/8.9.1) id g3BDggU34127; Thu, 11 Apr 2002 09:42:42 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from gallatin@cs.duke.edu) From: Andrew Gallatin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15541.37586.404951.505010@grasshopper.cs.duke.edu> Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 09:42:42 -0400 (EDT) To: Denis Serenyi Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: SSE bcopy In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 12) "Channel Islands" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Denis Serenyi writes: > 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? > As David says, have a look at http://kobe1995.net/~kaz/FreeBSD/SSE.en.html There is a patch there for 4.3. What are the performance implications to an SSE bcopy? How much faster is it than a normal bcopy? Would you consider releasing your code under a BSD license so that others could play with it, and possibly integrate it (or something based on it) into FreeBSD? Thanks, Drew To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message