I wrote a kernel patch that replaces the standard
copy_page()/clear_page() functions on Pentium III and Pentium IV with
SSE instructions.

If you have access to a Pentium 4 it would be great if you could
download the user space test apps from

http://colorfullife.com/~manfred/sse/

and run them.

The patch itself is still beta:
* find optimal number of %%xmm registers for copy_page(). The current
code uses 4, but 2 registers is faster on my Pentium III.

* use sse for normal memcopy. Then main advantage of sse over mmx is
that only the clobbered registers must be saved, not the full fpu state.

* verify that the code doesn't break SSE enabled apps.
I checked a sse enabled mp3 encoder and Mesa.

The implementation is derived from Intel sample code available at

http://developer.intel.com/software/idap/media/pdf/copy.pdf

--
	Manfred