RE: [PATCH v6] x86: load FPU registers on return to userland

David Laight
2019-01-15T12:44:53Z

From: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior
> Sent: 09 January 2019 11:47
>
> This is a refurbished series originally started by by Rik van Riel. The
> goal is load the FPU registers on return to userland and not on every
> context switch. By this optimisation we can:
> - avoid loading the registers if the task stays in kernel and does
> not return to userland
> - make kernel_fpu_begin() cheaper: it only saves the registers on the
> first invocation. The second invocation does not need save them again.
>
> To access the FPU registers in kernel we need:
> - disable preemption to avoid that the scheduler switches tasks. By
> doing so it would set TIF_NEED_FPU_LOAD and the FPU registers would be
> not valid.
> - disable BH because the softirq might use kernel_fpu_begin() and then
> set TIF_NEED_FPU_LOAD instead loading the FPU registers on completion.

Once this is done it might be worth while adding a parameter to
kernel_fpu_begin() to request the registers only when they don't
need saving.
This would benefit code paths where the gains are reasonable but not massive.

The return value from kernel_fpu_begin() ought to indicate which
registers are available - none, SSE, SSE2, AVX, AVX512 etc.
So code can use an appropriate implementation.
(I've not looked to see if this is already the case!)

David

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