Re: [PATCH 3/3] Use conditional

From: Tony Jones
Date: Sun Jul 03 2005 - 14:05:38 EST


On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 05:44:05PM +0200, Kurt Garloff wrote:

Agree with James, pls resend to linux-security-module@xxxxxxxxxx

The topic of replacing dummy (with capability) was discussed there
last week, in the context of stacker, but a common solution for both
cases would be needed.

Also, I was going to ask where 4/5 and 5/5 were :-)

If you are claiming a perf increase it would be nice to get an idea
what these patches were even though you believe most of the gain was
in patch #3.

Thanks

> Hi,
>
> this optimizes the case where no LSM is loaded and the (new) default
> capablities is used. These are not called via indirect calls but
> called as hardcoded calls and might thus be inlined; the price for
> this is a conditional -- benchmarks done by hp showed this to be
> beneficial (on ia64).
>
> Enjoy,
> --
> Kurt Garloff, Director SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

> From: Kurt Garloff <garloff@xxxxxxx>
> Subject: Replace indirect calls by a branch
> References: SUSE40217, SUSE39439
>
> In the LSM stub collection, rather do a branch than an indirect
> call. Many of the functions called do only return 0 or do nothing
> for the default (capability) case.
> This is a fast-path optimization; a branch is faster than an
> indirect call, even more so if correctly predicted.
> This shows a >3% perf. increase in netperf -t TCP_RR benchmark on IA64.
> (More exactly: The benchmark was taken with the next two patches
> applied as well, but I attribute the main effect to this patch.)
>
> This is patch 3/5 of the LSM overhaul.
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