Entropy Wave Open Source

Orc-0.4.6 released

entropywave — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:14:56 +0000

Changes:

– Various fixes to make Orc more portable
– Major performance improvements to NEON backend
– Minor performance improvements to SSE backend
– Major improvements to ARM backend, now passes regression
tests.

The defaults for floating point operations have been changed
somewhat: NANs are handled more like the IEEE 754 standard,
and denormals in operations are treated as zeros. The NAN
changes causes certain SSE operations to be slightly slower,
but produce less surprising results. Treating denormals as
zero has effects ranging from “slightly faster” to “now possible”.

New tool: orc-bugreport. Mainly this is to provide a limited
testing tool in the field, especially for embedded targets
which would not have access to the testsuite that is not
installed.

The environment variable ORC_CODE can now be used to adjust
some code generation. See orc-bugreport –help for details.

orcc has a new option to generate code that is compatible
with older versions of Orc. For example, if your software
package only uses 0.4.5 features, you can use –compat 0.4.5
to generate code that run on 0.4.5, otherwise it may generate
code that requires 0.4.6. Useful for generating source code
for distribution.

New NEON detection relies on Linux 2.6.29 or later.

Plans for 0.4.7: (not that past predictions have been at all
accurate) New opcodes for FIR filtering, scaling and compositing
of images and video. Instruction scheduler, helpful for non-OOO
CPUs. Minor SSE/NEON improvements. Orcc generation of inline
macros.

(Old News) Orc-0.4.5 released

entropywave — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:54:12 +0000

I forgot to make an announcement here when 0.4.5 was released a few weeks ago.

0.4.5 =====


This release contains many small improvements related to

converting GStreamer from liboil to Orc.
The major addition in this release is the mainstreaming of

the NEON backend, made possible by Nokia.
There is a new experimental option to ./configure,

--enable-backend, which allows you to choose a single code

generation backend to include in the library.  This is mostly

useful for embedded systems, and is not recommended in general.

The upcoming release will focus on improving code generation for the SSE and NEON backends.

Orc-0.4.4 Released

entropywave — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 06:34:38 +0000

This is almost entirely a cleanup and bug fix release.

- fix register copying on x86-64
- better checking for partial test failures
- fix documention build
- fix build on many systems I don’t personally use
- various fixes to build/run on Win64 (Ramiro Polla)
- add performance tests

Next release will merge in the new pixel compositing opcodes
and the SSE instruction scheduler.

Web: http://code.entropywave.com/projects/orc/

Download: http://code.entropywave.com/download/orc/

Orc moved to code.entropywave.com

entropywave — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:54:30 +0000

Orc has moved to its new home at code.entropywave.com. The git repository was previously hosted from my home directory at freedesktop.org, and there was no main web page to direct people to. That will be fixed now that it has a real web site. This move has been planned for some time, but the recent power outage and subsequent meltdown of the filesystem at freedesktop.org that contained the repository triggered the action.

The Git clone URI for Orc is now git://code.entropywave.com/git/orc.git