[PATCH][next] fortify: add branch hints on unlikely fortify_panic paths

From: Colin Ian King
Date: Wed Jun 25 2025 - 12:12:59 EST


Analysis with gcov while running the stress-ng urandom stressor
shows that there are a couple of fortify panic paths that are highly
unlikely to be executed for well-behaving code. Adding appropriate
branch hints improves the stress-ng urandom stressor my a small
but statistically measureable amount. Ran 100 x 1 minute tests and
measured the stressor bogo-op rates on a Debian based Intel(R)
Core(TM) Ultra 9 285K with a 6.15 kernel with turbo disabled to
reduce jitter.

Results based on a Geometic Mean of 100 tests:

Without patch: 50512.95 bogo-ops/sec
With patch: 50819.58 bogo-ops/sec

%Std.Deviation of ~0.18%, so low jitter in results, improvement of ~0.6%

Signed-off-by: Colin Ian King <colin.i.king@xxxxxxxxx>
---
include/linux/fortify-string.h | 4 ++--
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/include/linux/fortify-string.h b/include/linux/fortify-string.h
index e4ce1cae03bf..2ab8cb641d70 100644
--- a/include/linux/fortify-string.h
+++ b/include/linux/fortify-string.h
@@ -593,9 +593,9 @@ __FORTIFY_INLINE bool fortify_memcpy_chk(__kernel_size_t size,
* (The SIZE_MAX test is to optimize away checks where the buffer
* lengths are unknown.)
*/
- if (p_size != SIZE_MAX && p_size < size)
+ if (unlikely(p_size != SIZE_MAX && p_size < size))
fortify_panic(func, FORTIFY_WRITE, p_size, size, true);
- else if (q_size != SIZE_MAX && q_size < size)
+ else if (unlikely(q_size != SIZE_MAX && q_size < size))
fortify_panic(func, FORTIFY_READ, p_size, size, true);

/*
--
2.50.0