Re: [RFC PATCH 5/5] x86/entry: Store CPU info on exception entry

From: Borislav Petkov
Date: Sun Aug 07 2022 - 06:35:22 EST


On Sun, Aug 07, 2022 at 12:02:41PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Borislav Petkov <bp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > With the amount of logical cores ever increasing and how CPU packages
> > (nodes, L3 sharing, you name it) get more and more complex topology,
> > I'd say the 2 insns to show the CPU number in every exception is a good
> > thing to do.
>
> We can show it - I'm arguing against extracting it too early, which costs

Not early - more correct. We can say which CPU executed the exception
handler *exactly*. Not which CPU executed the exception handler *maybe*.

> us 2 instructions in the exception fast path

2 insns? They don't matter at all. FWIW, they'll pull in the per-CPU
cacheline earlier which should be a net win later, for code which does
smp_processor_id().

> - while in 99.999999999% of the cases we don't use that field at all ...

See my text above about the ever-increasing complexity of CPU topology.

Thx.

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.

https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette