Re: Intel P6 vs P7 system call performance

Ulrich Drepper (drepper@redhat.com)
Tue, 17 Dec 2002 12:06:29 -0800


Linus Torvalds wrote:

> The thing is, gettimeofday() isn't _that_ special. It's just not worth a
> vsyscall of it's own, I feel. Where do you stop? Do we do getpid() too?

This is why I'd say mkae no distinction at all. Have the first
nr_syscalls * 8 bytes starting at 0xfffff000 as a jump table. We can
transfer to a different slot for each syscall. Each slot then could be
a PC-relative jump to the common sysenter code or to some special code
sequence which is also in the global page.

If we don't do this now and it seems desirable in future we wither have
to introduce a second ABI for the vsyscall stuff (ugly!) or you'll have
to do the demultiplexing yourself in the code starting at 0xfffff000.

-- 
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Ulrich Drepper \    ,-----------------'   \ Mountain View, CA 94041 USA
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