Re: [PATCHSET percpu#for-next] percpu: convert ia64 to dynamic percpu and drop the old one, take#2

[Christoph Lameter <cl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 1 Oct 2009, Peter Chubb wrote:

> r3, r4 and r5 are currently unused by the kernel, and unused
> by GCC and ICC.   Only hand-written assembler and weird compilers use
> those registers(and my virtual-machine monitor :-().  If you wanted to
> experiment, that'd be a starting place.
>
> I'm not sure of the advantage though -- TLB mapping is relatively
> cheap, and we're no longer hard-wiring the translation register.

Dynamic and static per cpu variables could use relative access to that
register. This would reduce code size, avoid the use of a TLB entry.

> You';d have to do somne careful benchmarking on a wide variety of
> workloads and machines to get a definitive answer.

I have some patches here that make heavy use of dynamic percpu allocations
in the allocators to optimize the alloc / free paths.

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html