Re: bswap is slow on SPARC

Mouse <[email protected]> Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:01:26 -0500 (EST)
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.sparc
Message-ID <[email protected]>
> For most NetBSD architectures, GCC's __builtin_bswapX inserts fast
> inline MD code.  For SPARC, SPARC64, and VAX, it falls back to a
> function call.

> When encryption algorithms expect to be able to encode little-endian
> integers in a tight loop, that adds up to being *slow*.

Um, maybe I'm just revealing my ignorance, but wouldn't a reasonable
response to this be "don't use encryption that insists on using
little-endian for integers when you're on a SPARC"?  (For that matter,
why would encryption care about integer endianness to begin with?)

Not that speeding up byte-swapping would be a bad thing, but it seems
to me it isn't the only approach here.

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