Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2000 15:28:44 +0200 From: Vallo Kallaste <vallo@matti.ee> To: Oliver Fromme <olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> Cc: freebsd-multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: gogo + 3dnow Message-ID: <20000314152843.A50773@myhakas.matti.ee> In-Reply-To: <200003141233.NAA70280@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>; from Oliver Fromme on Tue, Mar 14, 2000 at 01:33:47PM %2B0100 References: <8ala1u$1cmj$1@atlantis.rz.tu-clausthal.de> <200003141233.NAA70280@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, Mar 14, 2000 at 01:33:47PM +0100, Oliver Fromme <olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> 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
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000314152843.A50773>