Re: [PATCH] Introduce nodemask_t ADT [0/7]

[Paul Jackson]

> go for it

I'll try.

The main thing I keep seeing, when I look at the resulting machine
code, is that things such as the following (stripped of everything
except the bare bones hardwired stuff I needed to compile):

    #define BITS_TO_LONGS(i) (i+63)/64
    #define NR_CPUS 64
    #define __mask(bits)    struct { unsigned long _m[BITS_TO_LONGS(bits)]; }
    typedef __mask(NR_CPUS) cpumask_t;

    #define mask_and(d,s1,s2)                                       \
    do {                                                            \
	    int i;                                                  \
	    for (i = 0; i < sizeof(d)/sizeof(unsigned long); i++)   \
		    d._m[i] = s1._m[i] & s2._m[i];                  \
    } while(0)

    unsigned long f(cpumask_t c, cpumask_t d, cpumask_t e)
    {
	mask_and(c,d,e);
	return c._m[0];
    }


end up producing quite fine code, such as a single inline 64 bit and
instruction, with no evidence of the for loop, array or struct wrapper,
on an ia64 (gcc 3.2.3 -O2) for the interesting guts of my silly little
test function f().

Objdump -d of function f() in above:

    4000000000000610 <f>:
    4000000000000610:       0d 60 c0 19 3f 23       [MFI]       adds r12=-16,r12
    4000000000000616:       00 00 00 02 00 00                   nop.f 0x0
    400000000000061c:       21 0a 31 80                         and r8=r34,r33;;
    4000000000000620:       11 00 00 00 01 00       [MIB]       nop.m 0x0
    4000000000000626:       c0 80 30 00 42 80                   adds r12=16,r12
    400000000000062c:       08 00 84 00                         br.ret.sptk.many b0;;

>From this I conjecture that I can provide a single call:

    cpumask_and(cpumask_t d, cpumask_t s1, cpumask_t s2);

that works on both normal (1 to 32 cpu) systems and on big iron systems,
with traditional 'C' pass by value semantics, all derived from a single
mask type that works for both node and cpu masks.

The one sticky point evident to me so far would be if some generic code
were passing a cpumask_t across a function call boundary, and needed to
be optimum for both small and sparc64 - one would want to pass by value,
the other would want to pass a pointer to the cpumask.

This is not your fathers 'C'.  The compile time inlining and
optimization provided by gcc enables it to do a lot more than Dennis
Ritchie's original C compiler that I learned on.

-- 
                          I won't rest till it's the best ...
                          Programmer, Linux Scalability
                          Paul Jackson <pj@xxxxxxx> 1.650.933.1373
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