From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ingo Molnar Subject: Re: Software prefetching considered harmful Date: Fri, 20 May 2011 01:34:00 +0200 Message-ID: <20110519233400.GA1954@elte.hu> References: <20110519.153259.1670240855485459381.davem@davemloft.net> <20110519.154700.1253349185128359804.davem@davemloft.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Return-path: Received: from mx3.mail.elte.hu ([157.181.1.138]:58212 "EHLO mx3.mail.elte.hu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S933298Ab1ESXeM (ORCPT ); Thu, 19 May 2011 19:34:12 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20110519.154700.1253349185128359804.davem@davemloft.net> Sender: linux-arch-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: To: David Miller Cc: torvalds@linux-foundation.org, linux-arch@vger.kernel.org, benh@kernel.crashing.org, rmk@arm.linux.org.uk * David Miller wrote: > So, to reiterate, I think you should kill all the list handling > prefetches off. Agreed. > What we can do is say "for this specific list use, prefetch does > in fact help". And provide an interface for that. I imagine there > are things like inode dirty writeback or some dcache stuff that > walks large lists and for which prefetch might be appropriate. I think the best 'interface' for that is to open-code the prefetch() right into the loop. This way it becomes well documented and very visible as well. Thanks, Ingo