On Wed, 2003-08-06 17:22:19 -0400, Ben Collins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 11:08:22PM +0200, Matthias Klose wrote: > > Jan-Benedict Glaw writes: > > Someone is making statements without knowing the real situation. > Changing to hwmul ops in libc and other key libraries makes a _huge_ > difference. Just for libssl alone it makes an UltraSPARC sshd server go > from 5 seconds for a login, to almost instant.
But if you start using that libssl on a hwmul-less system, it'll get
even worse there, won't it? So the slow ones get slower and the fast
ones get faster.
> This decision for sparc wasn't made just for the fuck of it. It actually
> has a purpose. You call it broken, I call it "older hardware is no
> longer supported in order to benefit newer machines". Sooner or later
Thanks for that statement. I think this one is _really_ honest and
describes the situation - more-or-less even for i386.
> the shit has to happen. Supporting sun4m-hwmul means we are still
> supporting machines that are almost 20 years old. I'd say that's pretty
> damn good.
Well, kernel already patches .mul and .div - can't something like that
be done in userspace, too? So a given app would neither need to do
softmath all the time (while the CPU could do hwmath) nor take an extra
penalty if it's compiled to use hwmath and need to emulate all the way.
Is there enough room in the ABI to implement something like this?
(...and yes, there are some sparcs in my cellar...)
MfG, JBG
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