Re: [PATCH 1/7] [NET]: uninline skb_put, de-bloats a lot

Ilpo Järvinen
2008-03-28T19:57:18Z

On Thu, 27 Mar 2008, Matt Mackall wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 17:54 -0700, Joe Perches wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 19:11 -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:
> > > In the 486 era, when CPU performance was close to 1:1 with memory,
> > > branches were more expensive than sequential memory fetches, and
> > > registers were scarce, inlining made a fair amount of sense.
> > >
> > > But now we've moved very far away from that indeed:
> >
> > Systems have certainly improved but Linux is used in a
> > wide variety of CPU Hz, memory & register architectures.
> >
> > Some of those systems haven't changed at all.
>
> It's true. In particular, 486s haven't changed at all since the 486 era.
> What's changed is that people no longer run 486s to go fast, they run
> them to save money. Saving memory is a win for those people.

I'd guess though that they won't get that big size saving because they
probably have carefully tuned configs as well.

> The same goes for embedded systems. Saving memory is much higher on the
> priority scale than performance. And the fact that saving memory on the
> low end aligns very nicely with increasing performance on the high end
> means that's the direction we're going.

Also if some TLB misses are avoided due to uninlining, it may well
rebalance the equation (each config & scenario is quite unique though).

--
i.