Re: [PATCH RFC 0/6] Implement per-processor data areas for i386.

Andreas Mohr
2006-08-27T17:21:58Z

Hi,

On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 01:44:17AM -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:
> This patch implements per-processor data areas by using %gs as the
> base segment of the per-processor memory. This has two principle
> advantages:
>
> - It allows very simple direct access to per-processor data by
> effectively using an effective address of the form %gs:offset, where
> offset is the offset into struct i386_pda. These sequences are faster
> and smaller than the current mechanism using current_thread_info().

Yess!!
Something like that had to be done eventually about the inefficient
current_thread_info() mechanism, but I wasn't sure what exactly.

> I haven't measured performance yet, but when using the PDA for "current"
> and "smp_processor_id", I see a 5715 byte reduction in .text segment
> size for my kernel.

This is interesting, since even by doing a non-elegant
current->... --> struct task_struct *tsk = current;
replacement for excessive uses of current, I was able to gain almost 10kB
within a single file already!
I guess it's due to having tried that on an older installation with gcc 3.2,
which probably does less efficient opcode merging of current_thread_info()
requests compared to a current gcc version.
IOW, .text segment reduction could be quite a bit higher for older gcc:s.

> This uses the x86 segmentation stuff in a way similar to NPTL's way of
> implementing Thread-Local Storage. It relies on the fact that each CPU
> has its own Global Descriptor Table (GDT), which is basically an array
> of base-length pairs (with some extra stuff). When a segment register
> is loaded with a descriptor (approximately, an index in the GDT), and
> you use that segment register for memory access, the address has the
> base added to it, and the resulting address is used.

Not a problem for more daring user-space apps (i.e. Wine), I hope?

Andreas Mohr

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