Re: [RFC][CFT][PATCHSET v1] uaccess unification

Vineet Gupta
2017-03-30T00:03:05Z

On 03/29/2017 04:42 PM, Al Viro wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 29, 2017 at 02:14:22PM -0700, Vineet Gupta wrote:
>
>>> BTW, I wonder if inlining all of the copy_{to,from}_user() is actually a win.
>>
>> Just to be clear, your series was doing this for everyone.
>
> Huh? It's just that most of architectures *were* inlining that;
> arc change was unintentional (copy_from_user/copy_to_user went
> uninlined, which your patch deals with), but it's not that I'm forcing
> inlining on every architecture out there.

That is correct - I didn't mean to say you changed it per-se , but that I saw
INLINE_COPY* all over the place but not for ARC :-)

>>> It might
>>> end up being a win, but that's not apriori obvious... Do you have any
>>> profiling results in that area?
>>
>> Unfortunately not at the moment. The reason for adding out-of-line variant was not
>> so much as performance but to improve the footprint for -Os case (some customer I
>> think).
>
> Just to make it clear - I'm less certain than Linus that uninlined is uniformly
> better, but I have a strong suspicion that on most architectures it *is*.
> And not just in terms of kernel size - I would expect better speed as well.
> The only reason why these knobs are there is that I want to separate the
> "who should switch to uninlined" from this series and allow for the possibility
> that for some architectures inlined will really turn out to be better.
> I do _not_ expect that there'll be many of those; if it turns out that there's
> none, I'll be only glad to make the guts of copy_{to,from}_user() always
> out of line.
>
> IOW your patch reverts an unintentional change of behaviour, but I really
> wonder if that (out-of-line guts of copy_{to,from}_user) isn't an overall
> win for arc. I've applied your patch, but it would be nice if you could
> arrange for testing with and without inlining and post the results. The
> same goes for all architectures; again, I would expect out-of-line to end up
> a win on most of them.

I guess I can in next day or two - but mind you the inline version for ARC is kind
of special vs. other arches. We have this "manual" constant propagation to elide
the unrolled LD/ST for 1-15 byte stragglers, when @sz is constant. In the
out-of-line version, we loose all of that and the code needs to fall thru all the
cases. We can possibly improve that by re-arranging the checks - so exit early if
no stragglers etc ...