Re: [RFC 1/6] Framework

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Sun Dec 11 2005 - 23:27:41 EST


Andi Kleen wrote:
On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 03:14:53PM +1100, Nick Piggin wrote:

Cool. That is a patch that should go on top of mine, because most of
my patch is aimed at moving modifications under interrupts-off sections,


That's obsolete then.

No it isn't.

With local_t you don't need to turn off interrupts
anymore.


Then you can't use __local_xxx, and so many architectures will use
atomic instructions (the ones who don't are the ones with tripled
cacheline footprint of this structure).

Sure i386 and x86-64 are happy, but this would probably slow down
most other architectures.


However I'm still worried about the use of locals tripling the cacheline
size of a hot-path structure on some 64-bit architectures. Probably we
should get them to try to move to the atomic64 scheme before using
local_t here.


I think the right fix for those is to just change the fallback local_t
to disable interrupts again - that should be a better tradeoff and
when they have a better alternative they can implement it in the arch.


Probably right.

(in fact i did a patch for that too, but considered throwing it away
again because I don't have a good way to test it)


Yep, it will be difficult to test.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.

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