On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, fam.valverde wrote: >i know that the very name of your org has a Xfree86 but is >nthere any plan to realese a xserver optimized for 3dnow or even >better 3dnow professional?... it would be awesome please any >information about the topic at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
There are some parts of the X server that would likely benefit from per processor assembler optimization, using also mmx/3dnow/sse technologies, however no work has been done on such other than what is in Mesa I believe. I've got some good ideas for optimizing parts of X with assembler, however certain things need to be ensured first. 1) A generic C codepath exists, so that code remains portable 2) Any assembler optimization should be build-time configureable 3) Runtime CPU detection and CPU capability detection should be done, and fallback to generic C code at runtime, if no assembler path is available for the CPU it is running on. Such code will be not only CPU dependant, but also compiler dependant, so it is something that should likely default to off for maximum portability. I've toyed around with ideas for doing this a bit, but haven't done any serious coding on it. I know many others have expressed an interest in doing this too though. It probably will happen at some point. The biggest trick, is finding parts of the code that would benefit from optimization to begin with, and try to optimize them algorithmically and otherwise first before resorting to any low level code. I'm sure many parts of X could be optimized better purely in C first. One thing that springs to mind is MMX/3Dnow/SSE optimized copy's, etc. that would probably benefit here and there. TTYL -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mike A. Harris Shipping/mailing address: OS Systems Engineer 190 Pittsburgh Ave., Sault Ste. Marie, XFree86 maintainer Ontario, Canada, P6C 5B3 Red Hat Inc. Phone: (705)949-2136 http://www.redhat.com ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris Red Hat XFree86 mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] General open IRC discussion: #xfree86 on irc.openprojects.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
