Re: [PATCH] tracing: Cleanup the convoluted softirq tracepoints

[Jason Baron <jbaron@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 02:16:54PM -0700, David Daney wrote:
> On 10/19/2010 12:49 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> [...]
> >So that saves _TWO_ bytes of text and replaces:
> >
> >-  1e:	83 3d 00 00 00 00 00 	cmpl   $0x0,0x0(%rip)        # 25<test+0x25>
> >-  25:	74 4d                	je     74<test+0x74>
> >+  1e:	e9 00 00 00 00       	jmpq   23<test+0x23>
> >+  23:	eb 4d                	jmp    72<test+0x72>
> >
> >So it trades a conditional vs. two jumps ? WTF ??
> >
> >I thought that jumplabel magic was supposed to get rid of the jump
> >over the tracing code ? In fact it adds another jump. Whatfor ?
> 
> The 'asm goto' construct in GCC-4.5 is deficient in this area.
> 
> GCC assumes that all exit paths from an 'asm goto' are equally
> likely, so the tracing (or dynamic printk etc.) code is assumed to
> be hot and is emitted inline.  Since they are inline like this,
> there are all these jumps around them and they pollute the I-Cache.
> 
> I was looking at fixing it, but I think a true general purpose fix
> would require enhancing GCC's grammar to allow specifying of the
> 'likelyness' of each exit path from 'asm goto'.
> 
> David Daney
> 

right, the next step is adding support for hot/cold labels, so the
tracing code will be annotaed with a 'cold' label. Thus, not adding the
'jmp' above on line '23', and in fact moving the tracing code
out-of-line. Maybe I haven't been clear on this.

thanks,

-Jason