On Jul 20, 2006, at 7:31 AM, Matt Sealey wrote:

quoted

But perhaps, in principle, couldn't one run four independent
streams in parallel?  Thus, for example, on an SSL-enabled
web server, one could service multiple encryption/decryption
threads at once.

In practice, I don't beleive the infrastructure for that kind
of parallelism is in place. I'm struggling to find a reason
to develop that kind of infrastructure. Mumble something about Cell.

If not AltiVec there is potential to use some features which come
with AltiVec like the data stream functionality. Or even the standard
PPC cache control stuff would work.

What's the case in the kernel for the memcpy functions etc., are
they optimized for doing things like longword copies rather than
byte-per-byte etc.? We found glibc sucked for that.

Matt, can I ask what exactly you are trying to accomplish?  There is  
a lot of work put into the kernel to ensure things are optimized.   
I'd say far more so than gets put into user space.

- k