Re: [PATCH] common implementation of iterative div/mod

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Wed May 14 2008 - 03:33:39 EST


Andrew Morton wrote:
On Thu, 08 May 2008 16:16:41 +0100 Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

We have a few instances of the open-coded iterative div/mod loop, used
when we don't expcet the dividend to be much bigger than the divisor.
Unfortunately modern gcc's have the tendency to strength "reduce" this
into a full mod operation, which isn't necessarily any faster, and
even if it were, doesn't exist if gcc implements it in libgcc.

The workaround is to put a dummy asm statement in the loop to prevent
gcc from performing the transformation.

This patch creates a single implementation of this loop, and uses it
to replace the open-coded versions I know about.

Believe it or not, this patch causes one of my test machines to fail to
find its disk.

good dmesg: http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/dmesg-t61p.txt
bad dmesg: http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/dmesg-t61p-dead.txt
config: http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/config-t61p.txt

Uh, OK. Do your other test machines work with it? Are there any relevant config differences (x86-64 vs 32?).

Hm, it's not that it can't find its disk, I think it's this:

init[1]: segfault at ffffffffff7008d2 ip ffffffffff7008d2 sp 7fff86e67488 error 14
init[1]: segfault at ffffffffff7008d2 ip 311ac07628 sp 7fff86e66cb0 error 4 in libgcc_s-4.1.2-20070925.so.1[311ac00000+d000]


Is it that the vsyscall page is trying to call into the kernel?

notrace static noinline int do_realtime(struct timespec *ts)
{
unsigned long seq, ns;
do {
seq = read_seqbegin(&gtod->lock);
ts->tv_sec = gtod->wall_time_sec;
ts->tv_nsec = gtod->wall_time_nsec;
ns = vgetns();
} while (unlikely(read_seqretry(&gtod->lock, seq)));
timespec_add_ns(ts, ns);
return 0;
}


timespec_add_ns() used to be entirely inlined, but now it contains the call to iter_div_u64_rem().

arch/x86/vdso/vclock_gettime.c has its own copies of other kernel functions which it can't directly call. We could add timespec_add_ns()/iter_div_u64_rem() to that list, though its pretty hacky. Could we link lib/div64.o into the vdso?

J
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