Re: [RFC][PATCH] eliminate extra tb_init_done check

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com>]

Well, I just tested ddk-build running inside a w2k3 box.  This normally
touches a lot of shadow code, which has a lot of tracing in it.

For each configuration, I ran the build once to warm up the disk cache,
then three more times for actual testing.


No patch: 156s, 161s, 156s
Patch:    161s, 156s, 156s

So I'm not seeing a big impact from this change.

Personally, I think I'd leave it as-is, because I don't like the idea of
marshalling all that code and then not doing anything, but I think
that's just a taste thing at this point. :-)

 -George

Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 15/10/08 07:20, "Lu, Guanqun" <guanqun.lu@intel.com> wrote:
> 
>> Two corner conditions are left untouched. One is the assembly in entry.S,
>> the other is the check of tb_init_done not immediately followed by
>> __trace_var.
>>
>> Or more aggressively, we can eliminate all the extra checks, make tb_init_done
>> a static variable, and rename __trace_var to trace_var which looks more like
>> a right interface name.
> 
> The macros check tb_init_done before calling __trace_var() to try and reduce
> the cost of the common case (tracing disabled) as far as possible. Hence we
> avoid a function call and computation of some arguments to that function.
> 
> I don't know if we've actually measured teh performance win from this. If we
> have, George would know about it.
> 
>  -- Keir
> 
>