Re: Patch to reorder functions in the vmlinux to a defined order

[Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@kvack.org>]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 08:48:43AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> For example, on x86(-64), memcpy() is mostly inlined for the interesting 
> cases. That's not always so. Other architectures will have things like the 
> page copying and clearing as _the_ hottest functions. Same goes for 
> architecture-specific things like context switching etc, that have 
> different names on different architectures.

On x86-64 the way gcc inlines memcpy() is rather broken, too.  If the 
kernel is compiled with -Os instead of -O2, gcc seems to always use 
rep ; movs or rep ; stos, which is substantially slower (factor of 10 
or more for some sizes -- a few parallel issued pipelined instructions 
vs tieing up the entire pipeline until the size of the move is known and 
dispatched) for small size data structures.  Each instance fixed was 
worth a few percent on the P4 when looking at lmbench's af_unix component.

		-ben
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