Re: Simplfying copy_siginfo_to_user

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, Jul 22, 2017 at 1:25 PM, Eric W. Biederman
<ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I played with some clever changes such as limiting the copy to 48 bytes,
> disabling the memset and the like but I could not get a strong enough
> signal to say that any one change removed the extra or a clear part of
> it 20ns.

What CPU did you use? Because the SMAP bit in particular matters.

The field-by-field copies are extremely slow on modern CPU's that
implement SMAP, unless you also use the special "unsafe_put_user()"
code (or the nasty old put_user_ex() code that some of the x86 signal
code uses).

So one of the advantages of just copy_to_user() ends up being visible
only on Broadwell+ (or whatever the SMAP cutoff is).

                 Linus