[theora-dev] [PATCH]: PPC/Altivec implementations of SAD and SSD

[Timothy B. Terriberry]

Venkatesh Srinivas wrote:
> This patch adds Altivec-optimized implementations of oc_enc_frag_sad and 
> oc_enc_frag_ssd. This patch is against the latest svn revision of 
> theora-ptalarbvorm.

Just some comments from a quick review:

Please follow the x86 structure and create a separate ppcint.h to be 
shared by the decoder and the encoder and a ppcenc.h for the 
encoder-specific functionality.

All file-scope symbols should be prefixed with oc_ (for functions) or 
OC_ for (constants and #defines).

have_altivec() (after being properly prefixed) should be in a "ppccpu.c" 
and should cache its result in oc_theora_state.cpu_flags, with an 
appropriate OC_CPU_PPC_ALTIVEC flag defined in cpu.h. You don't need to 
model yourself exactly after the x86 cpu.c here (which doesn't even live 
in lib/x86!), as it still hasn't been properly cleaned up from when it 
the encoder and decoder were in separate source trees. I'll fix that 
shortly.

> Currently this is only integrated into the Xcode build project and need 
> support for detecting Altivec on platforms other than OS X; on OS X it 
> uses the sysctl hw.vectorunit.

There is more complete detection code, for example, in Orc, that covers 
at least OS X, Linux, and the BSD's: 
http://code.entropywave.com/projects/orc/
See orccpu-powerpc.c
This code is BSD licensed, so there should be no problem adapting it to 
libtheora (with proper attribution, of course).

Note there may be problems with the SIGILL fallback method it uses:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=435771
But that's okay, because AFAICT that method wouldn't compile if it was 
enabled, since orc_fault_check_enable(), etc., aren't actually defined 
anywhere that I can see.