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Date:      Sat, 11 Nov 2006 10:19:42 +1030
From:      "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
To:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Cc:        "Jason C. Wells" <jcw@highperformance.net>, Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com>
Subject:   Re: Compiler Options
Message-ID:  <200611111019.43944.doconnor@gsoft.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <20061110222434.GA76724@icarus.home.lan>
References:  <4554D43E.5010700@highperformance.net> <20061110222434.GA76724@icarus.home.lan>

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On Saturday 11 November 2006 08:54, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> The kernel itself _will not_ use any SSE or MMX operations when built.
> This is because these optimisations are known to break the FreeBSD
> kernel.  This applies to all i386 architectures, and probably 64-bit
> architectures too (not sure).

I think this is mainly because the kernel has no FPU context so you can't=20
actually use any FPU operation (including SSE & MMX) without potentially=20
trashing userland data.

Also, the cost of saving/restoring the context is quite high so potential=20
benefits are largely negated.

(I could be wrong but the above is what I remember reading on various lists=
=20
over the years :)

=2D-=20
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C

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