AltiVec in the kernel

[Kumar Gala]

On Jul 20, 2006, at 7:31 AM, Matt Sealey wrote:

>
>
>> But perhaps, in principle, couldn't one run four independent
>> streams in parallel?  Thus, for example, on an SSL-enabled
>> web server, one could service multiple encryption/decryption
>> threads at once.
>>
>> In practice, I don't beleive the infrastructure for that kind
>> of parallelism is in place. I'm struggling to find a reason
>> to develop that kind of infrastructure. Mumble something about Cell.
>
> If not AltiVec there is potential to use some features which come
> with AltiVec like the data stream functionality. Or even the standard
> PPC cache control stuff would work.
>
> What's the case in the kernel for the memcpy functions etc., are
> they optimized for doing things like longword copies rather than
> byte-per-byte etc.? We found glibc sucked for that.

Matt, can I ask what exactly you are trying to accomplish?  There is  
a lot of work put into the kernel to ensure things are optimized.   
I'd say far more so than gets put into user space.

- k