Re: [PATCH v6 07/10] x86, mpx: decode MPX instruction to get bound violation information

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

On 06/19/2014 10:04 AM, Dave Hansen wrote:
> 
> Could you please support this position with some data?  I'm a bit
> skeptical that instruction decoding is going to be a
> performance-critical path.
> 
> I also don't see the extra field that you talked about in the previous
> thread?  What's the extra field?  I see a 'limit' vs. 'length', but you
> don't use 'length' at all, so I think you can use it instead, or at
> least union it.
> 
> I've taken a quick stab at trying to consolidate things.  I think I may
> have screwed up this:
> 
> 	insn->limit = MAX_MPX_INSN_SIZE - bytes;
> 
> Qiaowei, is there anything fundamentally broken with what I've got here?
> 

So I encouraged Qiaowei to do a limited special-purpose decoder, simply
because the glue to use the generic decoder was almost as large.  I am
overall not a huge fan of using the generic decoder in constrained
situation, because the generic decoder is very heavyweight not just in
terms of performance but in terms of interface -- because it has to.

	-hpa