Re: [PATCH] oprofile per-cpu buffer overrun

[Philippe Elie <phil.el@wanadoo.fr>]

John Levon wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 08:07:01PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> 
>>When implementing a circular buffer it is better to not constrain the head
>>and tail indices - just let them grow and wrap without bound.  You only need
>>to bring them in-bounds when you actually use them to index the buffer.

neat!

> I'm not sure why that's better.

We win in increment_head/increment_tail:

static void increment_head(struct oprofile_cpu_buffer * b)
{
- 
unsigned long new_head = b->head_pos + 1;
	wmb();
- 
if (new_head < (b->buffer_size))
- 
	b->head_pos = new_head;
- 
else
- 
	b->head_pos = 0;
+ 
b->head_pos++;
}

for this added cost when accessing the buffer:

b->buffer[b->head & b->buffer_size_mask];

Modulo use is not worth but with buffer_size a power of 2
it's probably a win, I'll try and measure this later, not
urgent since the problem is fixed, I added it in our todo.

regards,
Phil