Chuck Ebbert wrote:
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 16:46:25 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Fri, 3 Nov 2006, Chuck Ebbert wrote:
There is no real need to save eflags in switch_to(). Instead,
we can keep a constant value in the thread_struct and always
restore that.
I don't really see the point. The "pushfl" isn't the expensive part, and
it gives sane and expected semantics.
The "popfl" is the expensive part, and that's the thing that can't really
even be removed.
Well that wasn't the impression I got:
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 12:12:51 -0400
From: Benjamin LaHaise <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Sysenter crash with Nested Task Bit set
...
It's the pushfl that will be slow on any OoO CPU, as it has dependancies on
any previous instructions that modified the flags, which ends up bringing
all of the memory ordering dependancies into play. Doing a popfl to set the
flags to some known value is much less expensive.
That doesn't sound correct to me. The popf is far more expensive.
There is no popfl $IMM instruction, so setting flags never can avoid the
memory read and must make some more expensive assumptions about effects
on further instruction stream (TF, DF, all sign flags for conditional
jumps...).
Every processor I've ever measured it on, popf is slower. On P4, for
example, pushf is 6 cycles, and popf is 54. On Opteron, it is 2 / 12.
On Xeon, it is 7 / 91.
Zach
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