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Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2015 12:35:58 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PATCH] x86: Turn off GCC branch probability heuristics
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
To: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>, Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>,
        Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>, Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>, Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>,
        Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>,
        Aswin Chandramouleeswaran <aswin@hp.com>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Davidlohr Bueso <dave@stgolabs.net>,
        Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
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On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 11:57 AM, Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:
>
> I thinks its just the no-guess one:
>
>    text        data       dec  patch           reduction
> 7563475     1781048  10302987
> 7192973     1780024   9931461  no-guess            -4.8%
> 7354819     1781048    958464  align-1             -2.7%
> 7192973     1780024   9931461  no-guess + align-1  -4.8%

Yeah, a 5% code expansion is a big deal. Sadly, it looks like
'no-guess' also disables our explicit likely/unlikely handling.

Damn. If it actually honored likely/unlikely, then we should just do
it - and manually fix up any places where we really care.

But the fact that it apparently entirely disables not just the
guesses, but our *explicit* likely/unlikely, means that we can't fix
up the mistakes.

And in many of the hot codepaths that likely/unlikely really does
matter. Some of our hottest paths have known "this basically never
happens" situations that we do *not* want to break up our L1 I$ over.
There's a number of functions that have been optimized to really
generate good code, and "-fno-guess-branch-probability" disables those
manual optimizations.

So we'd have no way to fix it for the cases that matter.

Sad.

It might be worth bringing this up with some gcc people. I added Jakub
to the cc. Any other gcc people suggestions?

                            Linus