Re: Ideas for reducing memory copying and zeroing times

Robert L Krawitz (rlk@tiac.net)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 09:57:31 -0400


Date: Thu, 18 Apr 1996 23:27:16 -0400
From: "David S. Miller" <davem@caip.rutgers.edu>

Although this is where you'd see very noticable benefits, I've been
profiling the SparcLinux kernel a bit lately and a lot of copy/zero
happens in the mm subsystem and should not be ignored.

I can confirm this on the x86.

In fact, if your copy/zero is the best it can be, fork/exec/exit
become very quick operations even though they cause operations to be
performed on a processes entire page table.

Agreed. Fork and exec have sped up a lot on my system once I started
using an FPU-based memcpy/memory clear.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk@tiac.net>           http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net Tall Clubs International -- tci-request@aptinc.com or 1-800-521-2512