>>>>> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 11:32:27 -0800, "Chen, Kenneth W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>>>>> said:
Ken> Absolutely agreeing with updating the comments. Also in a way,
Ken> what you said earlier also make sense. Since clearing psr.mfh
Ken> is only half of the optimization. That would only optimize
Ken> away the storing part of context switch. However, if later we
Ken> take a dfh fault, if thread fph valid bit is on, we end up
Ken> loading from memory instead of a simple zeroing. So I better
Ken> do both, clearing psr.mfh and fph valid bit in thread.flags.
OK, I had assumed that you had tested this already. Clearing the
FPH_VALID bit in the syscall path does potentially increase the
syscall overhead as it requires a read-modify-write. Cache-wise we
should be OK, since the neighboring "on_ustack" byte is being touched
anyhow. If the code turns out to be difficult to schedule in the
syscall path, an alternate option would be to make FPH_VALID a
separate byte member, right next to on_ustack, so it can be cleared
with "st1 [rXX]=r0".
--david
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