Re: [PATCH v9 04/10] x86: refcount: prevent gcc distortions

hpa
2018-10-04T09:17:46Z

On October 4, 2018 2:12:22 AM PDT, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:
>
>* Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com> wrote:
>
>> I can run some tests. (@hpa: I thought you asked about the -pipe
>overhead;
>> perhaps I misunderstood).
>
>Well, tests are unlikely to show the overhead of extra lines of this
>magnitude, unless done very carefully, yet the added bloat exists and
>is not even
>mentioned by the changelog, it just says:
>
>Subject: [PATCH v9 02/10] Makefile: Prepare for using macros for inline
>asm
>
> Using macros for inline assembly improves both readability and
>compilation decisions that are distorted by big assembly blocks that
>use
> alternative sections. Compile macros.S and use it to assemble all C
> files. Currently, only x86 will use it.
>
>> I guess you regard to the preprocessing of the assembler. Note that
>the C
>> preprocessing of macros.S obviously happens only once. That’s the
>reason
>> I assumed it’s not that expensive.
>
>True - so first we build macros.s, and that gets included in every C
>file build, right?
>
>macros.s is smaller: 275 lines only in the distro test build I tried,
>which looks
>a lot better than my first 4,200 lines guesstimate.
>
>> Anyhow, I remember that we discussed at some point doing something
>like
>> ‘asm(“.include XXX.s”)’ and somebody said it is not good, but I don’t
>> remember why and don’t see any reason it is so. Unless I am missing
>> something, I think it is possible to take each individual header and
>> preprocess the assembly part of into a separate .s file. Then we can
>put in
>> the C part of the header ‘asm(".include XXX.s”)’.
>>
>> What do you think?
>
>Hm, this looks quite complex - macros.s is better I think. Also, 275
>straight assembly lines is
>a lot better than 4,200.
>
>Another, separate question I wanted to ask: how do we ensure that the
>kernel stays fixed?
>I.e. is there some tooling we can use to actually measure whether
>there's bad inlining decisions
>done, to detect all these bad patterns that cause bad GCC code
>generation?
>
>Thanks,
>
> Ingo

The assembly output from GCC is quite volumious; I doubt tacking a few hundred lines on will matter one iota.
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