High-Performance Dynamic Dispatch with GLIBC hwcaps

2025-07-16

This article demonstrates how to leverage GLIBC 2.33+ hwcaps for simple dynamic dispatch in amd64 and POWER shared libraries. By creating library files for different CPU instruction sets (e.g., x86-64-v4, x86-64-v3, etc.) under `/usr/lib/glibc-hwcaps/`, the dynamic linker automatically loads the corresponding library based on the highest instruction set supported by the CPU, optimizing performance. This solves the challenge of maintaining consistent library performance across different CPU architectures, as demonstrated in the Debian packaging of the ggml library used by llama.cpp and whisper.cpp.

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