Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752918AbbF3VXG (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jun 2015 17:23:06 -0400 Received: from mail.kernel.org ([198.145.29.136]:51473 "EHLO mail.kernel.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752596AbbF3VW5 (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Jun 2015 17:22:57 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 From: Andy Lutomirski Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2015 14:22:33 -0700 Message-ID: Subject: gcc feature request / RFC: extra clobbered regs To: gcc@gcc.gnu.org, "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , Linus Torvalds , "H. Peter Anvin" , Ingo Molnar , Thomas Gleixner Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1533 Lines: 36 Hi all- I'm working on a massive set of cleanups to Linux's syscall handling. We currently have a nasty optimization in which we don't save rbx, rbp, r12, r13, r14, and r15 on x86_64 before calling C functions. This works, but it makes the code a huge mess. I'd rather save all regs in asm and then call C code. Unfortunately, this will add five cycles (on SNB) to one of the hottest paths in the kernel. To counteract it, I have a gcc feature request that might not be all that crazy. When writing C functions intended to be called from asm, what if we could do: __attribute__((extra_clobber("rbx", "rbp", "r12", "r13", "r14", "r15"))) void func(void); This will save enough pushes and pops that it could easily give us our five cycles back and then some. It's also easy to be compatible with old GCC versions -- we could just omit the attribute, since preserving a register is always safe. Thoughts? Is this totally crazy? Is it easy to implement? (I'm not necessarily suggesting that we do this for the syscall bodies themselves. I want to do it for the entry and exit helpers, so we'd still lose the five cycles in the full fast-path case, but we'd do better in the slower paths, and the slower paths are becoming increasingly important in real workloads.) Thanks, Andy -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/