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Date:      Mon, 08 May 2006 05:13:00 +0200
From:      des@des.no (Dag-Erling =?iso-8859-1?Q?Sm=F8rgrav?=)
To:        "Vincent Blondel" <vincent@xtra-net.org>
Cc:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: I_686  MMX / 3DNOW / SSE / SSE2 ?
Message-ID:  <86d5epp5tv.fsf@xps.des.no>
In-Reply-To: <61809.192.168.1.21.1147030254.squirrel@192.168.1.21> (Vincent Blondel's message of "Sun, 7 May 2006 21:30:54 %2B0200 (CEST)")
References:  <61809.192.168.1.21.1147030254.squirrel@192.168.1.21>

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"Vincent Blondel" <vincent@xtra-net.org> writes:
> So in this context, I use 'CFLAGS=3D -O2 -pipe -fno-strict-aliasing'
> and 'CPUTYPE?=3Dathlon-xp' for compiling kernel but when I look at
> file /usr/src/sys/conf/kern.mk I see all kind of mmx/3dnow/sse/sse2
> are disabled [...]

We don't want to use floating point within the kernel, for a variety
of reasons (one of them being that saving and restoring the floating
point context when switching in and out of the kernel is very
expensive).

> So, finally, there is something I don't understand, what is the goal
> of 'CPU_ENABLE_SSE' [...]

The (now standard) CPU_ENABLE_SSE option adds code to save / restore
SSE registers when necesary.  This allows userland applications to use
SSE without getting clobbering eachother's data.

DES
--=20
Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav - des@des.no



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