[uClibc] uclibc for the desktop

Manuel Novoa III mjn3 at codepoet.org
Tue Nov 4 16:57:19 UTC 2003


On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 08:45:19AM -0800, Jeffrey Baitis wrote:
> Speed.
> 
> We just completed some preliminary benchmarks of our application and
> discovered that some functions execute much slower under uClibc than
> they do when compiled against glibc. Note that there is often a
> performance penalty associated with "small." :)

One big performance hit comes from the str/mem funcs.  The current
versions are coded to be portable and small.  It wouldn't take much
effort to port the optimized string funcs over from glibc, and this
is planned.  We just haven't gotten to it yet.

There are also some bottlenecks in the stdio code.  But I'm about
2/3rds through another rewrite and you can expect significant
performance improvements in the next month.

On the non-speed front, there is the bug in the shared lib loader
regarding weak symbol resolution.  Also, the ABI is still in flux
and will be until version 1.0.  Those are probably the biggest
stumbling blocks to using uClibc on the desktop.

> I am currently working to refine our tests to run on multiple platforms,
> and I will make results available assuming there is interest...

I look forward to seeing those numbers.  Up until this point, we've
really been focused more on filling in the functionality gaps than
on performance tuning.

Manuel




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