Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 6 Mar 2010 11:43:26 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH -tip] introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory barrier (v9) |
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On Thu, 4 Mar 2010, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > Perhaps NOFPU could do lazy context saving: clear the TS flag and only save > the FPU state if it's actually used by the signal handler?
If we can get that working reliably, we probably shouldn't use NOFPU at all, and we should just do it unconditionally. That big (and almost always pointless) FPU state save is a _big_ performance issue on signal handling, and if we can do it lazily, we should.
However, I'm not at all convinced we can do this reliably. How do we detect the "signal frame is dead" case with things like siglongjmp() etc?
And if we can't detect that "frame no longer exists", we can't really do the lazy context saving.
Now, there's _also_ the issue of the signal handler function possibly actually looking at the FPU state on the stack, and for that, a SA_NOFPU would be a good way to say "you can't do that". So it's possible that even if we could reliably detect the frame liveness we'd really have to use that new flag anyway.
But if we do need a SA_NOFPU flag, then that means that basically no app will use it, and it will be some special case for some really unusual library. So I really don't think this whole thing is worth it unless you could do it automatically.
(The "user accesses the frame" case _could_ possibly be handled by pointing the FP frame to a special faulting location, and never nesting the FP optimization. Nested signal handlers are unusual enough that they aren't worth optimizing for anyway. So I'm sure that there are possible solutions for "automatically just do the right thing" in theory, but I suspect they get rather complex)
Linus
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