Re: [lc-devel] [RFC] LZO de/compression support - take 6

[Nitin G. <nit...@gm...>]

On 5/29/07, Adrian Bunk <bu...@st...> wrote:
> On Tue, May 29, 2007 at 09:08:27AM +0100, Michael-Luke Jones wrote:
> > On 28 May 2007, at 18:11, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> >
> >> I have not seen any explanations:
> >> - Why did the upstream author write the code that way?
> >
> > Apparently due to his requirement for extreme portability. The original
> > code was designed to work on everything from 16-bit DOS through CRAY
> > supercomputers through Windows, Unices and Linux.
>
> Sure, this could be the reason in some or all cases.
>
> The upstream author knows the code best, and discussing such issues with
> him will in many cases be a win:
>
> It could be that there was in some cases no good reason, and the
> upstream code that gets used by many other projects could become faster.
>
> Or there was a good reason that applies also to the in-kernel version
> and a change breaks some corner case.
>

I have mailed the author with detailed changelog - waiting for reply.

> > The author has stated on the thread that it's a good idea to remove
> > unnecessary ifdefs when porting the code into the kernel, given that the
> > portability requirements are obviously no longer needed.
>
> "remove unnecessary ifdefs" implies "generated code is identical".
>
> That's quite different from "code is 10% faster".
>

Daniel made some changes to his testing code and now the perf gain is just 1.6%.

- Nitin