Re: Semaphore assembly-code bug

[Gabriel Paubert]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 07:46:06AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, linux-os wrote:
> > 
> > Linus, please check this out.
> 
> Yes, I concur. However, I'd suggest changing the "addl $4,%esp" into a 
> "popl %ecx", which is smaller and apparently faster on some CPU's (ecx 
> obviously gets immediately overwritten by the next popl).

Rather popl %eax or popl %edx then, a basic and MMX Pentium 
cannot pair:

	popl %ecx
	popl %ecx

for the simple reason that two instructions that have the
same destination register can't be paired.

OTOH, the other argument about reading or not memory in
this thread are a red herring. An additional memory read 
is cheap for data that is guaranteed to be in a cache line 
used by adjacent (in time) instructions.

Otherwise regparm(1) might even be better, movl %ecx,%eax is
the same size as push+pop, is faster, and may even reduce
stack usage by 4 bytes.

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