Re: [RFC/PATCH 2/5] mm/fs: add execute in place support

[Carsten Otte <cotte@freenet.de>]

Arnd Bergmann wrote:

>On Middeweken 11 Mai 2005 18:19, Carsten Otte wrote:
>  
>
>>Badari Pulavarty wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>you may want to look into some how eliminating few
>>>function pointer de-refs and checks for those who don't care.
>>>(#ifdef, unlikely(), or some arch & config magic).
>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>I do agree that addidional pointer derefs would be a nightmare
>>from the performance perspective. But afaics the patch does not
>>add such, and for checks I did already add likeleyness for the non-xip
>>case. Could you be more precise and specify which code path(es) you
>>mean?
>>    
>>
>
>I guess what Badari means is that you could add a function like
>
>#ifdef CONFIG_FS_XIP
>static inline int mapping_has_xip(struct address_space *mapping)
>{
>	return __unlikely(mapping->a_ops->get_xip_page != NULL);
>}
>#else
>#define mapping_has_xip(x) (0)
>#endif
>
>Using this in the hot path should result identical binary code to the
>current version as long as XIP is not enabled, while otherwise you
>need to access four data cache lines every time.
>
>I wouldn't expect much benefit from this since all these cache lines
>should be pretty hot and the branch gets predicted correctly anyway,
>but it surely doesn't hurt to do the abstraction.
>
>	Arnd <><
>  
>
Agreed. Will be changed in next version, thanks for clarification.