Re: + lib-vsprintfc-even-faster-decimal-conversion.patch added to -mm tree

[Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>]

On Thu, Mar 19 2015, Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 1:04 AM, Andrew Morton
> <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 16 Mar 2015 18:19:41 +0300 Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Rasmus, I redid benchmarks:
>>
>> tl;dr ;)  Is this an ack or a nack?
>
> New code executes slower for some input on one CPU I've benchmarked,
> both with -O2 and -Os (Core 2 Duo E6550). 

Running Alexey's code on my Core 2 Duo, I can confirm that. However, my
own benchmark did show the claimed 25-50% improvement, depending on
distribution. One difference between our benchmarks is that in Alexey's
case all branches are perfectly predictable - whether that matters I
can't tell [is there a "flush branch prediction" instruction?]. Also, I
found a somewhat subtle flaw in his benchmark [1] which gave the old
code a small (1-2 cycles) advantage. Fixing that and applying the small
tweak I just sent out [2], Alexey's benchmark no longer shows any
difference between the old and new code on the Core 2 Duo.

Rasmus


[1] put_dec was inlined into num_to_str in the old code - in the actual
kernel code, it is and was not, since it has another caller. I somehow
just cargo-culted the noinline_for_stack annotations all over, so it
also wasn't inlined in the benchmark of the new code.

[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/3/19/802