Hi all, This patchset (re)uses Bob Pearson's crc32 slice-by-8 code to stamp out a software crc32c implementation. It removes the crc32c implementation in crypto/ in favor of using the stamped-out one in lib/. There is also a change to Kconfig so that the kernel builder can pick an implementation best suited for the hardware. The motivation for this patchset is that I am working on adding full metadata checksumming to ext4. As far as performance impact of adding checksumming goes, I see nearly no change with a standard mail server ffsb simulation. On a test that involves only file creation and deletion and extent tree writes, I see a drop of about 50 pcercent with the current kernel crc32c implementation; this improves to a drop of about 20 percent with the enclosed crc32c code. When metadata is usually a small fraction of total IO, this new implementation doesn't help much because metadata is usually a small fraction of total IO. However, when we are doing IO that is almost all metadata (such as rm -rf'ing a tree), then this patch speeds up the operation substantially. Incidentally, given that iscsi, sctp, and btrfs also use crc32c, this patchset should improve their speed as well. I have not yet quantified that, however. This latest submission combines Bob's patches from late August 2011 with mine so that they can be one coherent patch set. Please excuse my inability to combine some of the patches; I've been advised to leave Bob's patches alone and build atop them instead. :/ Since the last posting, I've also collected some crc32c test results on a bunch of different x86/powerpc/sparc platforms. The results can be viewed here: http://goo.gl/sgt3i ; the "crc32-kern-le" and "crc32c" columns describe the performance of the kernel's current crc32 and crc32c software implementations. The "crc32c-by8-le" column shows crc32c performance with this patchset applied. I expect crc32 performance to be roughly the same. The two _boost columns at the right side of the spreadsheet shows how much faster the new implementation is over the old one. As you can see, crc32 rises substantially, and crc32c experiences a huge increase. v2: Use the crypto testmgr api for self-test. v3: Get rid of the -be version, which had no users. v4: Allow kernel builder a choice of speed vs. space optimization. v5: Reuse lib/crc32 for crc32c as well, and make crypto/crc32c use lib/crc32.c. v5.1: Include Bob Pearson's patches in submission request. v5.2: Fix changelogs for Bob's patches per akpm request. v5.3: Fix from header bug in patch mail generation scripts. v5.4: Rebase against next-20120118 per akpm request. One patch was already committed, which shortens this patchset. --D -- 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
