[m-rev.] diff: upgrade to Boehm GC 7.2alpha4

[Paul Bone]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 05:44:55PM +1100, Julien Fischer wrote:
>
> I have omitted the full diff of the boehm_gc directory - it's gigantic,
> and not very interesting.  (It's in /home/mercury/juliensf/tmp/BOEHM_GC.UPGRADE
> for those that are feeling brave.)
>
> I suspect the following will also fix some build problems on OpenSolaris
> and some of the BSDs, but I haven't checked yet.
>
> -------

Thanks Julien,

This has improved preformance in general.  (The ICFP2000 raytracer takes about
60 seconds now compared to 83 seconds previously for the same render).
Although more formal testing is required.

This has also improved scalability wrt Parallelism.  With parallel marking
disabled the and when using 8 threads on a Intel i7 (4 cores X 2 threads).  The
raytracer runs in 35 seconds (it runs in 60 seconds for the asm_fast.gc grade).
Previously with parallel marking disabled it only minimally cut the execution
time down, there's a graph on my desk.

With parallel marking enabled this drops down again to 19 seconds.  3 times the
speedup for 4 cores isn't bad for Boehm + Mercury.  Of course I think there's
plenty of room to improve.

Disclaimer: I ran these tests to satisfy my curiosity, they arn't exactly
scentific but the results are plausable and are probably representative of the
true results.

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