Re: [RFC] exit_thread() speedups in x86 process.c

[William Cohen <wcohen@redhat.com>]

One of the difficulties function reordering is getting useful data to 
figure out a reasonable order for the functions. People do guess wrong 
on the frequency of particular functions. Also naive ordering techniques 
like just ordering functions based on frequency do not work well.

A North Carolina State University senior project was done to generate 
ordering to improve TLB and cache hit ratios using the information 
generated by valgrind for user-space programs:

http://www.bclennox.com/cgi-bin/show.cgi?page=home

Xen is running the domains (and kernels) in user-space. Would it be 
possible to adapt valgrind/xen to run a domain so that similar 
information could be collected about a particular kernel?  Being able to 
use valgrind on the kernel could allow other analysis of the kernel 
code, e.g. find unwanted TLB flushes.

-Will

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