Re: [PATCH 03/13] jump label v9: x86 support

[Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 05:37:42PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> > [...] It costs you in some benchmarks. [...]
> 
> Microbenchmarks mostly, see below.

I didn't make these decisions, but I assume who made them had good reasons
and enough data on larger benchmarks too.

> > A much better to get smaller kernel images is to do more __cold annotations 
> > for slow paths. Newer gcc will then simply only do -Os for these functions.
> 
> That's an opt-in method and we cannot reach the kinds of 30% code size 
> reductions that -Os can achieve. Most code in the kernel is not cache-hot, 
> even on microbenchmarks.

Maybe, maybe not. But yes it can be approached from both ways.

Personally I would prefer to simply write less bloated code to get
code reductions. Simpler code is often faster too.

> 
> A much better model would be to actively mark hot codepaths with a __hot 
> attribute instead. Then the code size difference can be considered on a case 
> by case basis.

Yes that works too for those who still use -Os. 

e.g. marking the scheduler and a few mm hot paths this way would certain make sense.

> 
> And where GCC produces indefensibly crap code there GCC needs to be fixed. 
> Crap code often increases size so the fix would increase the efficiency of 
> -Os.

In some cases agreed, but common cases it's really: you asked for the smallest
you got it, even if it's slow. It's not -Odwim. 

One standard example here is a division by constant. The shortest way is 
using DIVI/IDIV if it's not 2^n and small enough, but it's really quite slow 
in hardware.  If you spend a few more bytes you can do much better for a wide 
range of constants.

Most likely we would need a new -O flag to avoid such cases. 

BTW I experimented with marking a few common cases like this (e.g. time unit 
conversion) hot, but gcc currently has trouble with __hot on inlines. So you
would always need to mark the caller.

-Andi

-- 
ak@linux.intel.com -- Speaking for myself only.