Re: checksumming with mmx, comment in arch/i386/lib/mmx.c

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On Tue, 11 Feb 2003 13:37:07 EST, [e-mail] (nick black)  said:

> firstly, to what domain of checksums does this comment apply?  secondly,
> why is it true?  it seems the PADDW family of instructions could work
> well here; is the slowdown a result of the kernel's need to muck with
> fpu state (from what i can tell, mmx uses the fp registers)?

(Note - second-hand info from somebody else who looked at MMX/SSE to optimize
an inner loop.  Double-check with CPU documentation).

There's a big "urp" sound as the processor switches from FP to MMX mode and
back, which apparently takes a large number of cycles.  You can to some extent
amortize this if you're switching once for a LONG loop (the analysis I saw was
with a million or so pixels on a screen image) - if you're switching in and out
for a 1500 byte packet (or even worse, a 100-byte packet) the impact may be
more noticable. You may wish to examine the SSE/SSE2 opcodes, which apparently
don't take this performance hit.

-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech

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Content-Type: application/pgp-signature

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Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Exmh version 2.5 07/13/2001

iD8DBQE+SUnCcC3lWbTT17ARAlY6AKDhqn32LRNYjqAFjc0dXwbxcXpKaACg7wp9
FEkuOf/VKV8EqxF1IjeaLpc=
=qcPo
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