20 Feb 2009 gary   » (Master)

Good news and bad news

Bad news first. The drop in speed between the Zeros in IcedTea6 1.3 and 1.4 doesn’t seem to come from Zero itself. I did a build of IcedTea6 1.4 with everything in ports/hotspot/src/*cpu reverted to 1.3, and the speed loss remained. It must be something to do with the newer HotSpot, or some other patch that got added or changed. I don’t really want to spend any more time on this than I have, so we’ll just have to live with it.

I’ve not come to any conclusions as to the difference in speed between the native-layer C++ interpreter and Zero either. It’s not the unaligned access stuff I mentioned: I ran some benchmarks, but the results were ambiguous. It may be libffi, but again, I don’t want to spend more time on this…

The good news is that I’ve been checking the Zero sources for SCA cover, emailing various people, and there’s only one tiny easily-removable bit I’m unsure about. I spent the morning preparing and submitting the first of the patches that will be required, the core build patch, which will hopefully be well received.

Syndicated 2009-02-20 14:53:12 from gbenson.net

Latest blog entries     Older blog entries

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!