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:
be6cb02779 ("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 <dvlasenk@redhat.com>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Cc: Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <aswin@hp.com>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20150410123017.GB19918@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
52648e83c9