Winter 2017 SPO600 Project

On a general-purpose computer, most highly-optimized machine-specific code is contained in the operating system, device drivers, and system libraries.

In this project, you will examine a function provided by the GNU libc library, glibc, and optimize that function for efficiency on AArch64 processors.

Resources

• glibc home page
  • Getting Started working with glibc
  • Contributing to glibc
• glibc Bugzilla at Sourceware
• ...others to be added...

Project Selection

1. Examine the glibc code to identify a function that is a candidate for optimization.
2. Record the function(s) you are interested in optimizing in the Winter 2017 SPO600 Participants table

Project Steps

• Identify a possible approach to the problem
• Test your approach.
  • You may do this by testing an alternative library containing your implementation of the function.
• Modify glibc. Use git to track your changes.
• Submit your change to the glibc community.
  • Make sure that your change does not cause regressions on other platforms, especially x86_64

Project Reporting

• Blog about your project work frequently (at least 2x/week).
• Submit your changes to the glibc community as early as possible. It will take some time for your changes to be accepted.

Project Phases

• Phase 0: Project Plan
  • Present your selected function and proposed approach to class in a 2-3 minute presentation the week of March 6.
• Phase I: Initial Results
  • Develop and test your optimizations
  • Due Sunday March 26 at midnight
• Phase II: Benchmarking and Upstreaming
  • Prove that your code does not cause a regressions on other platforms (at least x86_64) and improves things on AArch64.
  • Work with the community to get your changes accepted upstream.
  • Due Thursday April 6 at midnight
• Phase III: Upstream
  • Get your code accepted upstream.
  • Due Saturday April 22 at midnight