Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754431Ab0BRS2j (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:28:39 -0500 Received: from terminus.zytor.com ([198.137.202.10]:40376 "EHLO mail.zytor.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752256Ab0BRS2h (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:28:37 -0500 Message-ID: <4B7D86BC.10000@zytor.com> Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:28:12 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100120 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc12 Thunderbird/3.0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Luca Barbieri CC: Andi Kleen , mingo@elte.hu, a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl, akpm@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 09/10] x86-32: use SSE for atomic64_read/set if available References: <1266406962-17463-1-git-send-email-luca@luca-barbieri.com> <1266406962-17463-10-git-send-email-luca@luca-barbieri.com> <87eikj54wp.fsf@basil.nowhere.org> <20100218101156.GE5964@basil.fritz.box> <4B7D5BB4.4000307@zytor.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1017 Lines: 23 On 02/18/2010 10:14 AM, Luca Barbieri wrote: > >> I really feel that without a *strong* use case for this, there is >> absolutely no point. > For the specific 32-bit atomic64_t case, it is an improvement, but not > necessarily significant in the big picture. > Being able to efficiently use SSE in the kernel might however be more > broadly useful. > memcpy/memset/etc. (assuming SSE is the best option for these at least > on some processors) and checksums come to mind. > Also non-temporal SSE moves might be useful for things like memory > compaction without clobbering caches. We already do that kind of stuff, using kernel_fpu_begin()..kernel_fpu_end(). We went through some pain a bit ago to clean up "private hacks" that complicated things substantially. -hpa -- 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/