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Commit 35000870 authored by Anton Blanchard's avatar Anton Blanchard Committed by Benjamin Herrenschmidt
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powerpc: Optimise enable_kernel_altivec



Add two optimisations to enable_kernel_altivec:

- enable_kernel_altivec has already determined if we need to
save the previous task's state but we call giveup_altivec
in both cases, requiring an extra branch in giveup_altivec. Create
giveup_altivec_notask which only turns on the VMX bit in the
MSR.

- We write the VMX MSR bit each time we call enable_kernel_altivec
even it was already set. Check the bit and branch out if we have
already set it. The classic case for this is vectored IO
where we have to copy multiple buffers to or from userspace.

The following testcase was used to confirm this patch improves
performance:

http://ozlabs.org/~anton/junkcode/copy_to_user.c

Since the current breakpoint for using VMX in copy_tofrom_user is
4096 bytes, I'm using buffers of 4096 + 1 cacheline (4224) bytes.
A benchmark of 16 entry readvs (-s 16):

time copy_to_user -l 4224 -s 16 -i 1000000

completes 5.2% faster on a POWER7 PS700.

Signed-off-by: default avatarAnton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarBenjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
parent 8cd3c23d
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