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
- Examine the glibc code to identify a function that is a candidate for optimization.
- 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
