RFC: Reducing the number of non volatile GPRs in the ppc64 kernel

[Bill Schmidt]

I agree with Segher.  We already know we have opportunities to do a better
job with shrink-wrapping (pushing this kind of useless activity down past
early exits), so having examples of code to look at to improve this would
be useful.

-- Bill

Bill Schmidt, Ph.D.
Linux on Power Toolchain
IBM Linux Technology Center
wschmidt at us.ibm.com   (507) 319-6873




From:	Segher Boessenkool <segher at kernel.crashing.org>
To:	Anton Blanchard <anton at samba.org>
Cc:	linuxppc-dev at lists.ozlabs.org, Michael
            Gschwind/Watson/IBM at IBMUS, Alan Modra <amodra at gmail.com>, Bill
            Schmidt/Rochester/IBM at IBMUS, Ulrich Weigand
            <Ulrich.Weigand at de.ibm.com>, paulus at samba.org
Date:	08/05/2015 06:20 AM
Subject:	Re: RFC: Reducing the number of non volatile GPRs in the ppc64
            kernel



Hi Anton,

On Wed, Aug 05, 2015 at 02:03:00PM +1000, Anton Blanchard wrote:
> While looking at traces of kernel workloads, I noticed places where gcc
> used a large number of non volatiles. Some of these functions
> did very little work, and we spent most of our time saving the
> non volatiles to the stack and reading them back.

That is something that should be fixed in GCC -- do you have an example
of such a function?

> It made me wonder if we have the right ratio of volatile to non
> volatile GPRs. Since the kernel is completely self contained, we could
> potentially change that ratio.
>
> Attached is a quick hack to gcc and the kernel to decrease the number
> of non volatile GPRs to 8. I'm not sure if this is a good idea (and if
> the volatile to non volatile ratio is right), but this gives us
> something to play with.

Instead of the GCC hack you can add a bunch of -fcall-used-r14 etc.
options; does that not work for you?


Segher


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