You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
Packing loops tightly (-falign-loops=1) is beneficial to code size:
text data bss dec filename
12566391 1617840 1089536 15273767 vmlinux.align.16-byte
12224951 1617840 1089536 14932327 vmlinux.align.1-byte
11976567 1617840 1089536 14683943 vmlinux.align.1-byte.funcs-1-byte
11903735 1617840 1089536 14611111 vmlinux.align.1-byte.funcs-1-byte.loops-1-byte
Which reduces the size of the kernel by another 0.6%, so the
the total combined size reduction of the alignment-packing
patches is ~5.5%.
The x86 decoder bandwidth and caching arguments laid out in:
be6cb02 ("x86: Align jump targets to 1-byte boundaries")
apply to loop alignment as well.
Furtermore, modern CPU uarchs have a loop cache/buffer that
is a L0 cache before even any uop cache, covering a few
dozen most recently executed instructions.
This loop cache generally does not have the 16-byte alignment
restrictions of the uop cache.
Now loop alignment can still be beneficial if:
- a loop is cache-hot and its surroundings are not.
- if the loop is so cache hot that the instruction
flow becomes x86 decoder bandwidth limited
But loop alignment is harmful if:
- a loop is cache-cold
- a loop's surroundings are cache-hot as well
- two cache-hot loops are close to each other
- if the loop fits into the loop cache
- if the code flow is not decoder bandwidth limited
and I'd argue that the latter five scenarios are much
more common in the kernel, as our hottest loops are
typically:
- pointer chasing: this should fit into the loop cache
in most cases and is typically data cache and address
generation limited
- generic memory ops (memset, memcpy, etc.): these generally
fit into the loop cache as well, and are likewise data
cache limited.
So this patch packs loop addresses tightly as well.
Acked-by: Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]>
Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <[email protected]>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]>
Cc: Brian Gerst <[email protected]>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <[email protected]>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]>
Cc: Jason Low <[email protected]>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>
Cc: Tim Chen <[email protected]>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>
0 commit comments