Re: [PATCH 09/10] x86-32: use SSE for atomic64_read/set if available

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Thu Feb 18 2010 - 04:57:22 EST


On 02/18/2010 02:47 AM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

Unless the performance advantage is provably very compelling, I'm
inclined to say that this is not worth it.
There is the advantage of not taking the cacheline for writing in atomic64_read.
Also locked cmpxchg8b is slow and if we were to restore the TS flag
lazily on userspace return, it would significantly improve the
function in all cases (with the current code, it depends on how fast
the architecture does clts/stts vs lock cmpxchg8b).
Of course the big-picture impact depends on the users of the interface.
It does, and I would prefer to not take it until there is a user of the
interface which motivates the performance. Ingo, do you have a feel for
how performance-critical this actually is?

One heavy user is set_64() in the pagetable code. That's already in an expensive operation due to the page fault so the impact will be quite low, probably.

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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