martin@CITI.UMICH.EDU (12/19/88)
Earlier message... >In the announcement for the PurduePlus fixes it was implied that the >improvements would only be effective when using gcc. Is this due to >something intrinsic to gcc or was it just not tested with anything else? >I am interested in knowing whether PurduePlus has any effect on Suns >using cc rather than gcc. Well, the PURDUE+ patches take advantage of the sophisticated asm instruction (assembler output) to define the hairy getbits/putbits macro combination to be just two assembler (asm) instructions. There are one or two improvements which are machine/compiler independent. These are: 1) DONAHUE's mfbCopyArea patch (see ./contrib/server/speedups/donahue/README or the comment in the patched mfbbitblt.c file) 2) Quicker (unrolled and smarter) mfbBres.c Code. 3) Some changes to the Terminal Emulator Glyph BLT code. NOTE: I think that this is #ifdef'ed for FASTGETBITS which is ifdef'ed for (__GNUC__ && (mc68020 || vax)) But it may still be faster in the general case. This speedup ors four glyphs (width <= 8) into one full word before putting them onto the screen. So I dunno. I don't have time to check, NOR do I have a program (hint hint) to benchmark the server. I can just tell that the thing runs faster. I get some poor fool that is used to the vanilla mfb code and I see if they can tell the difference. (Not a very good way to test the server for speed) I suggest that you get GCC 1.31 and use it! It generates faster and smaller code than cc anyway. I am happy to hear that people are actually bagging other window systems for X11 after seeing these patches. (Or maybe that was just hype from ohio-state?) Marty.
bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) (12/20/88)
In article <8812190358.AA20033@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU> martin@CITI.UMICH.EDU writes: >I am happy to hear that people are actually bagging other window >systems for X11 after seeing these patches. (Or maybe that was just >hype from ohio-state?) Your patches were enough to trip at least one person to move from 10.4 to 11.3. Many are waiting for the whole mess to slim down a bit to fit better into 4Mb 3/50s. Another is waiting for xterm active icons (seriously!). In general around here, people who are casual users are still sticking with X10.4 because the performance advantages carry more weight for them than the features. Folks writing window code are gritting their teeth and using 11.3.