Re: page fault scalability patch V8: [4/7] universally available

[Andy Lutomirski <luto@myrealbox.com>]

Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 06:41:25PM +0300, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> 
>>On Monday 20 September 2004 23:57, Andi Kleen wrote:
>>
>>>On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 01:49:20PM -0700, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>>>
>>>>On Mon, 20 Sep 2004, Denis Vlasenko wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>I think it shouldn't be this way.
>>>>>
>>>>>OTOH for !CONFIG_386 case it makes perfect sense to have it inlined.
>>>>
>>>>Would the following revised patch be acceptable?
>>>
>>>You would need an EXPORT_SYMBOL at least. But to be honest your
>>>original patch was much simpler and nicer and cmpxchg is not called
>>>that often that it really matters. I would just ignore Denis' 
>>>suggestion and stay with the old patch.
>>
>>A bit faster approach (for CONFIG_386 case) would be using
> 
> 
> It's actually slower. Many x86 CPUs cannot predict indirect jumps
> and those that do cannot predict them as well as a test and jump.

Wouldn't alternative_input() choosing between a cmpxchg and a call be 
the way to go here?  Or is the overhead too high in an inline function?

(No patch included since I don't pretend to understand gcc's asm syntax 
at all.)

--Andy