[RFC 2/3] PowerPC: lazy altivec enabling in kernel

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tuesday 24 April 2007, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> It would be better to put a test and conditional branch in
> giveup_altivec to skip the mtmsrd if MSR_VEC is already set.  That
> would avoid adding the overhead of the trap in the case when MSR_VEC
> isn't already set, besides being much less code.

When I discussed this with Sebastian, my assumption was that even
the mfmsr is rather expensive by itself, but I may have interpreted
the profile data incorrectly.

Do you think it's safe to assume that by skipping mtmsr we can avoid
the bulk of the overhead on most CPUs?

	Arnd <><