On Wed, Mar 21, 2018 at 6:32 AM, Ingo Molnar <mi...@kernel.org> wrote: > > * Linus Torvalds <torva...@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > >> And even if you ignore that "maintenance problems down the line" issue >> ("we can fix them when they happen") I don't want to see games like >> this, because I'm pretty sure it breaks the optimized xsave by tagging >> the state as being dirty. > > That's true - and it would penalize the context switch cost of the affected > task > for the rest of its lifetime, as I don't think there's much that clears XINUSE > other than a FINIT, which is rarely done by user-space. > >> So no. Don't use vector stuff in the kernel. It's not worth the pain. > > I agree, but: > >> The *only* valid use is pretty much crypto, and even there it has had issues. >> Benchmarks use big arrays and/or dense working sets etc to "prove" how good >> the >> vector version is, and then you end up in situations where it's used once per >> fairly small packet for an interrupt, and it's actually much worse than >> doing it >> by hand. > > That's mainly because the XSAVE/XRESTOR done by kernel_fpu_begin()/end() is so > expensive, so this argument is somewhat circular.
If we do the deferred restore, then the XSAVE/XRSTOR happens at most once per kernel entry, which isn't so bad IMO. Also, with PTI, kernel entries are already so slow that this will be mostly in the noise :( --Andy