On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 9:00 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 10:57:31AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote: >> How expensive would it be to add another field to timer_list and >> just have both pointers? > > That would add 4/8 bytes to every structure containing a timer, > so I'd rather avoid it if possible. I didn't expect too many timers to be in allocated structures at the same time on most systems, but I haven't researched this at all. We should probably update the comment about the cacheline alignment though: when most users embed the timer_list in some other structure, it's not valid at all, and forcing timer_list to be cacheline aligned would waste way more space than an extra field. > But one option might be to inflict this onto users of outdated compilers > and use the union for modern ones. Good idea, this sounds better than the alternatives at least. The remaining users of those old compilers certainly don't care that much about micro-optimizing the kernel anyway. Arnd -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-s390" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html