Re: [PATCH v12 00/18] Enable FSGSBASE instructions

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Mon May 18 2020 - 02:18:39 EST


On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 12:52:53AM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
> Benefits:
> Currently a user process that wishes to read or write the FS/GS base must
> make a system call. But recent X86 processors have added new instructions
> for use in 64-bit mode that allow direct access to the FS and GS segment
> base addresses. The operating system controls whether applications can
> use these instructions with a %cr4 control bit.
>
> In addition to benefits to applications, performance improvements to the
> OS context switch code are possible by making use of these instructions. A
> third party reported out promising performance numbers out of their
> initial benchmarking of the previous version of this patch series [9].

The [9] reference can't be resolved anywhere in this mail.