On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 06:55:01PM -0700, Sriram Natarajan wrote: > Libraries like libgd, jpeg can be cpu intensive in web work loads and > delivering a version of this library that can take advantage of newer > cpu architectures can deliver better performance. I was wondering, if > this is some thing we can target for OpenSolaris 2010.02 release ?
There are a couple of different ways this could be done. You could do what libc does, which is to mount the optimized version on a central location with a service at boot time. It's got some downsides, we're thinking about making some kernel tweaks that would make this a bit saner than it currently is. Another way is to do what the opengl folks do -- see the ogl-select service. It's quite similar to what the libc service does, but it overwrites a symlink each time, and does so in a potentially unwriteable directory, so it'll likely have to be fixed at some point. There's also the possibility of using library filters. See the Application Linking and Library Guide on docs.sun.com. Basically, you'll pay a cost at library load time, but if your processes aren't short lived and you're not as maniacal about performance as the opengl folks are, it may be the best thing to do. You should probably be having this conversation with the folks on tools-linkers at opensolaris.org. They'll be able to walk you through the options more thoroughly, at the very least. Danek
