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Packing loops tightly (-falign-loops=1) is beneficial to code size: text data bss dec filename 12566391 1617840 1089536 15273767 vmlinux.align.16-byte 12224951 1617840 1089536 14932327 vmlinux.align.1-byte 11976567 1617840 1089536 14683943 vmlinux.align.1-byte.funcs-1-byte 11903735 1617840 1089536 14611111 vmlinux.align.1-byte.funcs-1-byte.loops-1-byte Which reduces the size of the kernel by another 0.6%, so the the total combined size reduction of the alignment-packing patches is ~5.5%. The x86 decoder bandwidth and caching arguments laid out in: be6cb02 ("x86: Align jump targets to 1-byte boundaries") apply to loop alignment as well. Furtermore, modern CPU uarchs have a loop cache/buffer that is a L0 cache before even any uop cache, covering a few dozen most recently executed instructions. This loop cache generally does not have the 16-byte alignment restrictions of the uop cache. Now loop alignment can still be beneficial if: - a loop is cache-hot and its surroundings are not. - if the loop is so cache hot that the instruction flow becomes x86 decoder bandwidth limited But loop alignment is harmful if: - a loop is cache-cold - a loop's surroundings are cache-hot as well - two cache-hot loops are close to each other - if the loop fits into the loop cache - if the code flow is not decoder bandwidth limited and I'd argue that the latter five scenarios are much more common in the kernel, as our hottest loops are typically: - pointer chasing: this should fit into the loop cache in most cases and is typically data cache and address generation limited - generic memory ops (memset, memcpy, etc.): these generally fit into the loop cache as well, and are likewise data cache limited. So this patch packs loop addresses tightly as well. Acked-by: Denys Vlasenko <[email protected]> Cc: Andy Lutomirski <[email protected]> Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <[email protected]> Cc: Borislav Petkov <[email protected]> Cc: Brian Gerst <[email protected]> Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <[email protected]> Cc: H. Peter Anvin <[email protected]> Cc: Jason Low <[email protected]> Cc: Linus Torvalds <[email protected]> Cc: Paul E. McKenney <[email protected]> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]> Cc: Tim Chen <[email protected]> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/[email protected] Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <[email protected]>
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