At one place it was written about inline function "it increases the code size which increases memory consumption and instruction cache footprint" what is instruction cache footprint?? Can anyone please explain this to me.
An instruction Cache keeps track of last accessed instructions, in order to save future memory accesses to them. memory accesses are expensive, they can take hundreds of clock cycles. On the other hand, cache accesses are fast. they can take from very few clock cycles to a few dozens, mainly depending on which cache it is (L1 or L2). anyway it is much more efficient than memory accesses. Caches are very limited in size. in general, if you have the very same instruction in several different addresses, you may end up with the cache holding it in several different blocks, which is a waste, because instead it could hold some other instruction. If you inline, you get to have the same instructions over and over in many different memory addresses. caches differentiate between instructions by their address, so as i said you may end up with this instruction(s) cached up too many times. I guess this is what the author meant. HTH, ohad. -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
