Re: [PATCH 09/10] x86-32: use SSE for atomic64_read/set if available

[Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>]

On 02/18/2010 02:47 AM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>>> Unless the performance advantage is provably very compelling, I'm
>>> inclined to say that this is not worth it.
>>>        
>> There is the advantage of not taking the cacheline for writing in atomic64_read.
>> Also locked cmpxchg8b is slow and if we were to restore the TS flag
>> lazily on userspace return, it would significantly improve the
>> function in all cases (with the current code, it depends on how fast
>> the architecture does clts/stts vs lock cmpxchg8b).
>> Of course the big-picture impact depends on the users of the interface.
>>      
> It does, and I would prefer to not take it until there is a user of the
> interface which motivates the performance.  Ingo, do you have a feel for
> how performance-critical this actually is?
>    

One heavy user is set_64() in the pagetable code.  That's already in an 
expensive operation due to the page fault so the impact will be quite 
low, probably.

-- 
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function