Re: [x86] do_arch_prctl

From: Eric Lacombe
Date: Wed Nov 19 2008 - 19:22:30 EST


Le jeudi 20 novembre 2008 01:07:42 Jeremy Fitzhardinge, vous avez écrit :
> Eric Lacombe wrote:
> > Thanks for your answer, I've got one last question ;)
> > In the ARCH_GET_GS, can you explain the line 834 to 838?
> >
> > In fact, at first sight I thought that just the line 836 was sufficient,
> > but I obviously miss the case where MSR_KERNEL_GS_BASE does not reflect
> > the value requested, hence my question.
>
> I think the rationale is that rdmsr is slow, so reading the value from
> the task context is faster where possible.

But in this case why not doing instead:

828 case ARCH_GET_GS: {
829 unsigned long base;
830 unsigned gsindex;
831 if (task->thread.gsindex == GS_TLS_SEL)
832 base = read_32bit_tls(task, GS_TLS);
840 else
841 base = task->thread.gs;

> > 828 case ARCH_GET_GS: {
> > 829 unsigned long base;
> > 830 unsigned gsindex;
> > 831 if (task->thread.gsindex == GS_TLS_SEL)
> > 832 base = read_32bit_tls(task, GS_TLS);
> > 833 else if (doit) {
> > 834 asm("movl %%gs,%0" : "=r" (gsindex));
> > 835 if (gsindex)
> > 836 rdmsrl(MSR_KERNEL_GS_BASE, base);
> > 837 else
> > 838 base = task->thread.gs;
> > 839 }
> > 840 else
> > 841 base = task->thread.gs;

and as I see with ARCH_GET_FS we have :

817 case ARCH_GET_FS: {
818 unsigned long base;
819 if (task->thread.fsindex == FS_TLS_SEL)
820 base = read_32bit_tls(task, FS_TLS);
821 else if (doit)
822 rdmsrl(MSR_FS_BASE, base);
823 else
824 base = task->thread.fs;
825 ret = put_user(base, (unsigned long __user *)addr);
826 break;
827 }

So it seems that the "rdmsrl(MSR_FS_BASE, base);" could be faster than an
access to the memory, else why bother with the "doit" case?

Regards,

Eric

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