• Ingo Molnar's avatar
    x86, mm: dont use non-temporal stores in pagecache accesses · f1800536
    Ingo Molnar authored
    Impact: standardize IO on cached ops
    
    On modern CPUs it is almost always a bad idea to use non-temporal stores,
    as the regression in this commit has shown it:
    
      30d697fa: x86: fix performance regression in write() syscall
    
    The kernel simply has no good information about whether using non-temporal
    stores is a good idea or not - and trying to add heuristics only increases
    complexity and inserts fragility.
    
    The regression on cached write()s took very long to be found - over two
    years. So dont take any chances and let the hardware decide how it makes
    use of its caches.
    
    The only exception is drivers/gpu/drm/i915/i915_gem.c: there were we are
    absolutely sure that another entity (the GPU) will pick up the dirty
    data immediately and that the CPU will not touch that data before the
    GPU will.
    
    Also, keep the _nocache() primitives to make it easier for people to
    experiment with these details. There may be more clear-cut cases where
    non-cached copies can be used, outside of filemap.c.
    
    Cc: Salman Qazi <sqazi@google.com>
    Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
    Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    f1800536
uaccess_64.h 5.67 KB