gcc-2.7 creates faster code than pgcc-1.1.1

[Jamie Lokier]

ôÅÒÅÈÉÎ ÷ÑÞÅÓÌÁ× wrote:
> After several day of search I finally find out offending
> instruction that slow down gzip compiled with egcs-1.1.1/pgcc-1.1.1
> on PentiumPro 180MHz (132MB RAM) but the result seems crazy to me.
> 
> This instruction is:
> andl $255, %eax
> in flush_window (util.c) function body (it is inlined from updcrc)
> 
> if you manually replace it with
> movzbl %al, $eax
> this will boost decompression by 20%.

In the past I have written hand-optimised assembly language, tuned for
the different x86 families, and I found movzbl to be a very effective
instruction on the Pentium Pro.  So what you describe sounds correct.

Another is to do xorl %eax,%eax just before loading something into %al.
That is fast on the PPro too.

-- Jamie