Re: [RFC PATCH] x86, fpu: Use eagerfpu by default on all CPUs

From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Sun Feb 22 2015 - 06:07:35 EST


On Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 06:18:01PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> That's true. The question is whether there are enough of them, and
> whether twiddling TS is fast enough, that it's worth it.

Yes, and let me make it clear what I'm trying to do here: I want to make
sure that eager FPU handling (both allocation and switching - and no,
I'm not confusing the concepts) *doesn't* *hurt* any relevant workload.
If it does, then we'll stop wasting time right there.

But(!), if the CR0.TS lazy dance turns out to be really slow and the
eager handling doesn't bring a noticeable slowdown, in comparison, we
should consider doing the eager thing by default. After running a lot
more benchmarks, of course.

Which brings me to the main reason why we're doing this: code
simplification. If we switch to eager, we'll kill a lot of non-trivial
code and the FPU handling in the kernel becomes dumb and nice again.

> > And last but not least, why does the handling of CR0.TS traps have to be
> > complicated? It does not look like rocket science to me, it should be a

If you think so, just go and look at the latest tip/x86/fpu commits and
the amount of WTF in the commit messages.

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.

ECO tip #101: Trim your mails when you reply.
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