According to the Intel datasheet, the REP MOVSB instruction
exposes a pretty heavy setup cost (50 ticks), which hurts
short string copy operations.
This change tries to avoid this cost by calling the explicit
loop available in the unrolled code for strings shorter
than 64 bytes.
The 64 bytes cutoff value is arbitrary from the code logic
point of view - it has been selected based on measurements,
as the largest value that still ensures a measurable gain.
Micro benchmarks of the __copy_from_user() function with
lengths in the [0-63] range show this performance gain
(shorter the string, larger the gain):
- in the [55%-4%] range on Intel Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v4
- in the [72%-9%] range on Intel Core i7-4810MQ
Other tested CPUs - namely Intel Atom S1260 and AMD Opteron
8216 - show no difference, because they do not expose the
ERMS feature bit.
Signed-off-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Alan Cox <gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
Cc: Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Brian Gerst <brgerst@gmail.com>
Cc: Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@redhat.com>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@stressinduktion.org>
Cc: Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@redhat.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/4533a1d101fd460f80e21329a34928fad521c1d4.1498744345.git.pabeni@redhat.com
[ Clarified the changelog. ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
236222d393