On ARM, NEON, et al.

So for a bit of a diversion I finally found a decent use for my beagleboard-xm ... i can use it to write and debug ARM assembly and NEON ...

To that end I 'upgraded' the sd-card to the latest available image of angstrom - for no particular reason I went with the GNOME build. Which is course was a big mistake since it uses that systemd shit (which sent me out on a google-search-of-rage looking for like-minded individuals of which there are plenty), notworkmanager and all sorts of crap. And X is still un-accelerated so it's pretty much pointless anyway.

So I went back to the other angstrom build, which at least starts the network up from boot and has gcc and gdb. But no opkg for emacs? Ugh ... so I just had to compile that myself. A bit over an hour, but I just watching tv by then and by now I was just happy I had a system which worked, and I already knew it wasn't a super-computer.

I dragged out the 2nd hand monitor I had for playing with the beagle, remembered where I had put my old ADSL router which I set up as a switch (seriously, i'd 'lost' it for about a year), and Bob's James' dad, I have a development environment up. I should really go out and get a faster SD card though, since the one it came with is slow ... (i presume that's the issue).

It's been a while since I looked much at ARM. I remember VFP being a bit weird, but NEON is nice and more like SPU. It's really missing pack-bits instruction though (take MSB of each element and pack to a scalar bitmap), at least for what I was looking at.

To start with I was looking at using it to build LBP codes - if i had a pack bits it would only be 4 instructions instead of 7. Pity I still need to use a lookup table to get the LBP u2 code though (there is a definite pattern to the table, so there might be some bit-manipulation tricks to do it too). It's been really crappy and cold, and I've been too exhausted from work, so I haven' felt like doing much yet.

Before I set the beagle up I also poked around just cross compiling stuff and seeing how it went. I came up with a builder in ARM code which was at least all in registers if not particularly compact - and what should have been an equivalent implementation in C didn't compile very well. But I guess we know that.

I spent another hour or so last night just fiddling with another version of the ARM code - it was actually quite enjoyable to play with something just for fun. It doesn't matter if i finish it, or if i ever get it to work but trying to hand-optimise one screen-full worth of code to solve an interesting problem is quite a puzzling challenge. It's nice to work on something fairly simple for a change ...