From owner-freebsd-multimedia Tue Mar 14 5:29: 7 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Received: from solaris.matti.ee (solaris.matti.ee [194.126.98.135]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FB0737B5C8 for ; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 05:29:01 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from vallo@matti.ee) Received: from myhakas.matti.ee (myhakas.matti.ee [194.126.114.87]) by solaris.matti.ee (Postfix) with ESMTP id 865C52CE51; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 15:28:40 +0200 (EET) Received: by myhakas.matti.ee (Postfix, from userid 1000) id 0A6601C57CE; Tue, 14 Mar 2000 15:28:44 +0200 (EET) Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 15:28:44 +0200 From: Vallo Kallaste To: Oliver Fromme Cc: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: gogo + 3dnow Message-ID: <20000314152843.A50773@myhakas.matti.ee> Reply-To: vallo@matti.ee References: <8ala1u$1cmj$1@atlantis.rz.tu-clausthal.de> <200003141233.NAA70280@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.6i In-Reply-To: <200003141233.NAA70280@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>; from Oliver Fromme on Tue, Mar 14, 2000 at 01:33:47PM +0100 Organization: =?iso-8859-1?Q?AS_Matti_B=FCrootehnika?= Sender: owner-freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Tue, Mar 14, 2000 at 01:33:47PM +0100, Oliver Fromme wrote: > What do you mean by saying "FreeBSD doesn't support" it? > FreeBSD doesn't "support" 3DNow either, but that doesn't > prevent anyone from writing programs that run under FreeBSD > and use 3DNow instructions. In fact, I already did that. > > If you mean that FreeBSD's compiler (gcc) should automatically > create SSE (or MMX, or 3DNow) instructions from standard code, > well, that's a different issue. And it's very non-trivial to > _automatically_ identify code sections that could be improved > using SSE (or ...) instructions. In particular, you cannot > use FPU instructions at the same time, and switching between > those instruction sets involves a certain delay penalty. > > Therefore I think it is _much_ more useful to improve critical > code sections _manually_ by replacing them with SSE (...) code > if appropriate. This can result in _dramatic_ performance > improvements (+100% and more). This is not just theory -- I > experimented a lot with 3DNow in the past months. Well, my backgound while saying what I said was no more than the README file which come with gogo some time ago. The port PLIST is broken, it refers nonexistent documents for now but that was it. The README said that Linux has SSE support but FreeBSD don't so the compressor can't use SSE under FreeBSD. It said nothing about in what form Linux has support for SSE and I wasn't interested enough to find out myself. So in what form Linux has support for SSE? If it means unofficial patches for nasm then please forget my question, I thought we missed something bigger :-) Anyway, thanks for your thorough answer. -- Vallo Kallaste vallo@matti.ee To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message