powerpc: Improve scheduling of system call entry instructions
After looking at our system call path, Mary Brown suggested that we should put all mfspr SRR* instructions before any mtspr SRR*. To test this I used a very simple null syscall (actually getppid) testcase at http://ozlabs.org/~anton/junkcode/null_syscall.c I tested with the following changes against the pseries_defconfig: CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING=n CONFIG_AUDIT=n to remove the overhead of virtual CPU accounting and syscall auditing. POWER6: baseline: mean = 757.2 cycles sd = 2.108 modified: mean = 759.1 cycles sd = 2.020 POWER7: baseline: mean = 411.4 cycles sd = 0.138 modified: mean = 404.1 cycles sd = 0.109 So we have 1.77% improvement on POWER7 which looks significant. The POWER6 suggest a 0.25% slowdown, but the results are within 1 standard deviation and may be in the noise. Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org> Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
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