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From: Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com>
To: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>,
	Sagi Grimberg <sagi@grimberg.me>, Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de>,
	Mark Wunderlich <mark.wunderlich@intel.com>,
	"James E.J. Bottomley" <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com>,
	Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>,
	John David Anglin <dave.anglin@bell.net>,
	linux-block@vger.kernel.org, linux-parisc@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] block: use the __packed attribute only on architectures where it is efficient
Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2024 22:18:11 +0800	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <ZcI/o7Ky7dzSLK25@fedora> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <78172b8-74bc-1177-6ac7-7a7e7a44d18@redhat.com>

On Tue, Feb 06, 2024 at 12:14:14PM +0100, Mikulas Patocka wrote:
> The __packed macro (expanding to __attribute__((__packed__))) specifies
> that the structure has an alignment of 1. Therefore, it may be arbitrarily
> misaligned. On architectures that don't have hardware support for
> unaligned accesses, gcc generates very inefficient code that accesses the
> structure fields byte-by-byte and assembles the result using shifts and
> ors.
> 
> For example, on PA-RISC, this function is compiled to 23 instructions with
> the __packed attribute and only 2 instructions without the __packed
> attribute.

Can you share user visible effects in this way? such as IOPS or CPU
utilization effect when running typical workload on null_blk or NVMe.

CPU is supposed to be super fast if the data is in single L1 cacheline,
but removing '__packed' may introduce one extra L1 cacheline load for
bio.


thanks,
Ming


  reply	other threads:[~2024-02-06 14:18 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 4+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2024-02-06 11:14 [PATCH] block: use the __packed attribute only on architectures where it is efficient Mikulas Patocka
2024-02-06 14:18 ` Ming Lei [this message]
2024-02-06 18:31   ` Mikulas Patocka
2024-02-07  2:43     ` Ming Lei

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