Swap should be better done native?

[Martin Buchholz]

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 16:56, Ulf Zibis <Ulf.Zibis at gmx.de> wrote:

>> No.  In general, we can't assume that the target address is int-aligned,
>> and non-x86 architectures require alignment for word writes to memory.
>>
>
> This should be a rare case even on non-x86 architectures.
> It generally should only happen, if the offset of a sliced buffer is not
> aligned to it's value size.
> Fresh allocated buffers should be always properly aligned (hopefully).
>
> I wanted to say, that 4 put(byte) can be replaced by one put(int), but would
> perform likely worse in the rare case of unaligned position pointer.
> E.g. this can happen frequently on UTF-8 coder, but could always be checked.

I don't think unaligned access is rare.
Perhaps because I've spent too much time in the zip implementation.

Ulf, you could start a project to find all the places where we could replace
unaligned reads on x86 with int reads.  E.g. in zip_util.h I see

#define CH(b, n) (((unsigned char *)(b))[n])
#define SH(b, n) (CH(b, n) | (CH(b, n+1) << 8))
#define LG(b, n) ((SH(b, n) | (SH(b, n+2) << 16)) &0xffffffffUL)
#define LL(b, n) (((jlong)LG(b, n)) | (((jlong)LG(b, n+4)) << 32))
#define GETSIG(b) LG(b, 0)

by conditionally using short, int, or long reads,
you could speed up zip file reading significantly on x86.
Which seems like an important optimization.

Martin