On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 03:57:57PM +1100, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> I'm sure something similar would be possible with FreeBSD, but I don't
> have the expertise to actually implement it. I'm less certain how
> much of a win this would be in the general scheme of things: Apart
> from special cases (like OpenSSL), I don't think the libraries have
> a significant impact on overall performance.
This would be quite doable, but I agree with you in thinking there
aren't many people who would make use of it. If the kernel were to
become dynamically tunable so e.g. GENERIC would dynamically select
between the various CPU-specific asm optimizations, then there'd be
more of a justification to making a generic userland self-tuning as
well.
> IMHO, the main market for this feature would be people who just do
> binary installs - if you're doing a buildworld, you can tune to your
> hardware[1]. If we wanted to just speed up OpenSSL on binary
> installs, we could have processor-optimised variants of libssl.*
> available as packages (tick the box that suits your processor if you
> want the optimised library).
If/when we ever get a packaged base system this would be a good and
easy thing to do. We could do it now, but it wouldn't be natural in
the sysinstall scheme of things (i.e. you'd have to install the OS,
and then select the OpenSSL-i686 package from the listing of packages
in the ports tree).
Kris
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