On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 1:53 AM, Boaz Harrosh <bharrosh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > You miss understood me. I'm saying that we know the beggining of the > string is aligned and Nick offered to pad the last long, so surly > a shift by 2 (or 3) + the reduction of the 12 dec-and-test to 3 > should give you an optimization? Sadly, right now we don't know that the string is necessarily even aligned. Yes, it's always aligned in a dentry, because it's either the inline short string, or it's the longer string we explicitly allocated to the dentry. But when we do name compares in __d_lookup, only one part of that is a dentry. The other is a qstr, and the name there is not aligned. In fact, it's not even NUL-terminated. It's the data directly from the path itself. So we can certainly do compares a "long" at a time, but it's not entirely trivial. And just making the dentries be aligned and null-padded is not enough. Most likely, you'd have to make the dentry name compare function do an unaligned load from the qstr part, and then do the masking. Which is likely still the best performance on something like x86 where unaligned loads are cheap, but on other architectures it might be less so. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html