On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > text_poke() itself only applies/unapplies the LOCK prefix - a single > byte. We shouldnt be doing that at all: the cost of LOCK is > insignificant (a few cycles) and most systems are SMP anyway. No, the cost of LOCK is quite high on a lot of systems. On P4's in particular, since LOCK is serializing, it's about 140 cycles or so (and breaks all speculation). So we definitely want to remove it for any generic kernels. (lock is fairly cheap on AMD K8's, and reportedly on Intel's upcoming Nehalem too, but on Core 2 it's about 35 cycles - quite noticeable, although not nearly the disaster that netburst is) Oh, and text_poke() is also used for inserting the debug instruction for kprobes (and restoring the original byte), but yes, that is always just a single byte too. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
