[Vm-dev] ARMv8 BitBLT speedups provided by RPi/Ben Avison

[tim Rowledge]

Our friends in Cambridge (Real Cambridge, not Backup Cambridge) have spent a nice chunk of money to bring the ARM32 bitblt speedups they provided in '14/5/6 into the ARMv8 world. Quite a few microbenchmarks covering the tests Ben did (and he wrote a testing framework that ran some 10s of thousands of tests) are improved by an order of magnitude, some by 30X and one by 57X !

All the code to date is pushed to 
  https://github.com/bavison/opensmalltalk-vm/tree/Ben
with the latest version of the test harnesses at 
  https://github.com/bavison/SqueakBitBltTest

Look for items changed in the last few days ie 25th april or later. I haven't had a chance to do more than glance as yet. I *suspect* Ben has manually edited the generated BitBltPlugin.c file, which will mean doing some diffing and back-porting into Slang. Maybe.

I, for one, welcome our new v8 blit overlords.

tim
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
"#define QUESTION ((bb) || !(bb))  - Shakespeare."