[Ffmpeg-devel] [RFC] use optimized routines "à la" SMP-alternatives

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 10:37:10AM +0200, Guillaume POIRIER wrote:
> Hi there,
> While I was reading this article: http://lwn.net/Articles/164121/ a
> crazy idea came to my mind:

This is Linux stupidity at its finest.

> Would it be possible to get libavcodec self-optimize itself at runtime
> by using the tricks  described in this article?

No. Well possible but not without evil evil hacks that are outside the
scope of what lavc should be doing, not to mention making code pages
writable and overwriting them.. Why anyone would want to add such
blatently UGLY hacks is beyond me. If you want speed, compile for the
proper hardware profile! Don't try to hack every single program to
runtime-optimize itself!! This is nothing but pure bloat.

> Note that I imagine it won't work any other platforms than the ones
> that support ELF.

It's possible to do the same thing without using ELF at all. Kernel
lusers just think the whole world is a GNU (which somewhat makes sense
because their build process already depends so heavily on GNU
toolchain hacks, but that's stupid to begin with..) and therefore use
the GNU/ELF specific way to do these things rather than simple
"portable" alternatives.

Rich