Re: [PATCH] lib/sort: Add the sort_r() variant

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 22 May 2019 13:25:50 +0200 Boris Brezillon <boris.brezillon@collabora.com> wrote:

> Some users might need extra context to compare 2 elements. This patch
> adds the sort_r() which is similar to the qsort_r() variant of qsort().
> 
> Signed-off-by: Boris Brezillon <boris.brezillon@collabora.com>
> ---
> Hello,
> 
> A few more details about this patch.
> 
> Even though I post it as a standalone patch, I do intend to use it in
> a real driver (v4l2 driver), just didn't want to have it burried in a
> huge patch series.
> 
> Note that sort() and sort_r() are now implemented as wrappers around
> do_sort() so that most of the code can be shared. I initially went for
> a solution that implemented sort() as a wrapper around sort_r() (which
> basically contained the do_sort() logic without the cmp_func arg)
> but realized this was adding one extra indirect call (the compare func
> wrapper), which I know are being chased.

Please move the above text into the changelog.  It's probably useful
and we can afford the disk space ;)

> There's another option, but I'm pretty sure other people already
> considered it and thought it was not a good idea as it would make
> the code size grow: move the code to sort.h as inline funcs/macros so
> that the compiler can optimize things out and replace the indirect
> cmp_func() calls by direct ones. I just tried it, and it makes my .o
> file grow by 576 bytes, given that we currently have 122 users of
> this function, that makes the kernel code grow by ~70k (that's kind
> of a max estimate since not all users will be compiled in).

eep, let's not do that.

> --- a/include/linux/sort.h
> +++ b/include/linux/sort.h

Patch otherwise looks OK.  Please include it with the patch series
which uses it.  Feel free to add

Acked-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>