On Wed, 2016-01-20 at 14:46 +0000, Robin Murphy wrote:
> > Of course, the 0.004014s maybe not accurate enough, it is just an
> > approximate number.
>
> A mean and standard deviation of at least, say, 5 runs each with and
> without the patch would be considerably more meaningful (even if
> still
> far from statistically significant).
It wouldn't surprise me if replacing the proposed change with an 'asm
volatile("nop")' or two also give a boot time delta of several
milliseconds (due to change in cache line alignment of functions). I
don't believe you can reliably measure such minor changes.
It doesn't mean that the proposed change isn't a good addition though,
it obviously results in less code getting executed for the cost of one
or two instructions for a compare and branch.
--
Tixy
