Re: RFC: remove __read_mostly

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Mon Dec 17 2007 - 05:34:21 EST


On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 01:33:45 +0100 Andi Kleen <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Kyle McMartin <kyle@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > I'd bet, in the __read_mostly case at least, that there's no
> > improvement in almost all cases.
>
> I bet you're wrong. Cache line behaviour is critical, much more
> than pipeline behaviour (which unlikely affects). That is because
> if you eat a cache miss it gets really expensive, which e.g.
> a mispredicted jump is relatively cheap in comparison. We're talking
> one or more orders of magnitude.

So... once we've moved all read-mostly variables into __read_mostly, what
is left behind in bss?

All the write-often variables. All optimally packed together to nicely
maximise cacheline sharing.
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