Re: [PATCH] Turn rdmsr, rdtsc into inline functions, clarify names

From: Rusty Russell
Date: Sat Aug 05 2006 - 22:53:47 EST


On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 04:38 +0200, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 07:47:41PM +1000, Rusty Russell wrote:
> > [Andi, sorry, x86_64 part untested, so sending straight to you]
> >
> > rdmsr and rdtsc are macros, altering their arguments directly. An
> > inline function would offer decent typechecking, but needs to take
> > pointer args. The comment notes that gcc produces better code with
>
> I think I prefer the macro variant actually. Sorry. It just looks
> better without the &s.

Hi Andi,

Please reconsider. This isn't about being pretty, it's about not
having hidden side-effects, and having typechecking.

> We don't care very much about the code quality here because
> rdmsr/wrmsr are always very slow in microcode anyways and tend
> to synchronize the CPUs.

Agreed, but comment about it above the macros made me wary, so I checked
it. No significant code difference with gcc >= 4.0, at least.

> If you feel a need to clean up I would suggest you convert more
> users over to the ll variants which take a single 64bit value
> instead of two 32bit ones.

You mean the l and ll variants? The 64 bit variants are rdmsrl and
rdtscll, not to be confused with rdtscl, which returns the lower 32
bits. This confusion caused the x86_64 bug in gameport.c which the
patch comment mentioned (at least, seems to be a bug to me).

See why I want to fix these names?

So if you would prefer u64 rdtsc64(), u32 rdtsc_low(), u64 rdmsr64(int
msr), u32 rdmsr_low(int msr), I can convert everyone to that, although
it's a more invasive change...

Thanks,
Rusty.
--
Help! Save Australia from the worst of the DMCA: http://linux.org.au/law

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/