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Eric Biggers 64bd72048a statx: optimize copy of struct statx to userspace
I found that statx() was significantly slower than stat().  As a
microbenchmark, I compared 10,000,000 invocations of fstat() on a tmpfs
file to the same with statx() passed a NULL path:

	$ time ./stat_benchmark

	real	0m1.464s
	user	0m0.275s
	sys	0m1.187s

	$ time ./statx_benchmark

	real	0m5.530s
	user	0m0.281s
	sys	0m5.247s

statx is expected to be a little slower than stat because struct statx
is larger than struct stat, but not by *that* much.  It turns out that
most of the overhead was in copying struct statx to userspace, mostly in
all the stac/clac instructions that got generated for each __put_user()
call.  (This was on x86_64, but some other architectures, e.g. arm64,
have something similar now too.)

stat() instead initializes its struct on the stack and copies it to
userspace with a single call to copy_to_user().  This turns out to be
much faster, and changing statx to do this makes it almost as fast as
stat:

	$ time ./statx_benchmark

	real	0m1.624s
	user	0m0.270s
	sys	0m1.354s

For zeroing the reserved fields, start by zeroing the full struct with
memset.  This makes it clear that every byte copied to userspace is
initialized, even implicit padding bytes (though there are none
currently).  In the scenarios I tested, it also performed the same as a
designated initializer.  Manually initializing each field was still
slightly faster, but would have been more error-prone and less
verifiable.

Also rename statx_set_result() to cp_statx() for consistency with
cp_old_stat() et al., and make it noinline so that struct statx doesn't
add to the stack usage during the main portion of the syscall execution.

Signed-off-by: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
2017-04-03 01:05:57 -04:00
arch Merge branch 'x86-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-04-02 09:27:02 -07:00
block blk-mq: include errors in did_work calculation 2017-03-24 15:42:47 -06:00
certs
crypto Merge branch 'linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/herbert/crypto-2.6 2017-03-31 12:11:32 -07:00
Documentation Documentation/filesystems: fix documentation for ->getattr() 2017-04-03 01:05:56 -04:00
drivers dmaengine fixes for 4.11-rc5 2017-04-02 16:29:34 -07:00
firmware
fs statx: optimize copy of struct statx to userspace 2017-04-03 01:05:57 -04:00
include Merge branch 'sched-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-04-02 09:25:10 -07:00
init mm: move mm_percpu_wq initialization earlier 2017-03-31 17:13:30 -07:00
ipc Merge branch 'WIP.sched-core-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-03-03 10:16:38 -08:00
kernel Merge branch 'sched-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-04-02 09:25:10 -07:00
lib Merge branch 'core-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-04-02 09:18:59 -07:00
mm mm/hugetlb.c: don't call region_abort if region_chg fails 2017-03-31 17:13:30 -07:00
net The restriction of NFSv4 to TCP went overboard and also broke the 2017-04-01 10:43:37 -07:00
samples Merge branch 'rebased-statx' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2017-03-03 11:38:56 -08:00
scripts x86/build: Mostly disable '-maccumulate-outgoing-args' 2017-03-30 11:53:04 +02:00
security Merge branch 'WIP.sched-core-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-03-03 10:16:38 -08:00
sound ALSA: hda - fix a problem for lineout on a Dell AIO machine 2017-03-31 10:58:26 +02:00
tools Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2017-03-23 11:29:49 -07:00
usr
virt KVM: pci-assign: do not map smm memory slot pages in vt-d page tables 2017-03-28 10:08:54 +02:00
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MAINTAINERS A new EDAC driver for the Pondicherry2 memory controller IP found in the 2017-03-27 11:09:00 -07:00
Makefile Linux 4.11-rc5 2017-04-02 17:23:54 -07:00
README

Linux kernel
============

This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst

Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users.
These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.