Re: [PATCH 2/3] x86/mce: Pack boolean MCE flags into a structure

From: Tony Luck
Date: Wed Sep 05 2012 - 14:56:44 EST


On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:22 AM, Naveen N. Rao
<naveen.n.rao@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Many MCE flags are boolean in nature, but are declared as integers
> currently. We can pack these into a bitfield to save some space.

Before this patch:
size arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mcheck/mce.o
text data bss dec hex filename
18946 4930 776 24652 604c arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mcheck/mce.o

After:
size arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mcheck/mce.o
text data bss dec hex filename
19335 4890 776 25001 61a9 arch/x86/kernel/cpu/mcheck/mce.o

So we do indeed see "data" reduced by 40 bytes. But
"text" is up by 389. This seems to be because you have
another change, not described in the commit log, buried
in part 2 to add get_dont_log_ce(), set_dont_log_ce() etc.

Compiler version: gcc version 4.4.6 20120305 (Red Hat 4.4.6-4) (GCC)

I know I'm contradicting the feedback you got from Borislav here, but
is this code churn really worth it to save 40 bytes? I don't think so.

-Tony
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