FreeBSD Has Been Working On AMD64 SIMD libc Optimizations - Coming For FreeBSD 14.1

The FreeBSD project today issued their Q4'2023 status report that highlights all of their interesting work accomplished last quarter on this open-source platform. Among the interesting achievements were the FreeBSD Foundation sponsoring AMD64 SIMD improvements for FreeBSD 15 that will also be back-ported to FreeBSD 14.1.

Among the Q4'2023 highlights for the FreeBSD project included:

- FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE making it out in November.

- The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored work on SIMD enhancements for AMD64 (x86_64). In particular, the work focused on SIMD implementations of more than one dozen C library (libc) functions with scalar implementations as well as making use of SSE... Yes, an x86-64-v2 target while initially I was hoping they were catering to AVX(2) or AVX-512 for modern hardware. But these SIMD libc improvements set the stage for x86-64-v3/x86-64-v4 optimizations in the future. Even with the current SIMD work they found the performance improved by a factor of 5.54x on average.

There is more information on this FreeBSD SIMD AMD64 work via the FreeBSD Foundation Blog. This work is currently staged for FreeBSD 15 but will be back-ported for FreeBSD 14.1.

- A Zenbleed fix for AMD Zen 2 processors.

- The FreeBSD Infrastructure team began a $100,000 cluster refresh for CI servers, web servers, package builders, and more.

- Many kernel updates for device drivers, file-systems, and various other subsystems / features.

- More progress on Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure support as well as for Amazon EC2 / AWS.

- Continued progress on updating the GCC default compiler version to GCC 13.

More details on the Q4'2023 FreeBSD achievements via the FreeBSD.org status report.