• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    word-at-a-time: make the interfaces truly generic · 36126f8f
    Linus Torvalds authored
    This changes the interfaces in <asm/word-at-a-time.h> to be a bit more
    complicated, but a lot more generic.
    
    In particular, it allows us to really do the operations efficiently on
    both little-endian and big-endian machines, pretty much regardless of
    machine details.  For example, if you can rely on a fast population
    count instruction on your architecture, this will allow you to make your
    optimized <asm/word-at-a-time.h> file with that.
    
    NOTE! The "generic" version in include/asm-generic/word-at-a-time.h is
    not truly generic, it actually only works on big-endian.  Why? Because
    on little-endian the generic algorithms are wasteful, since you can
    inevitably do better. The x86 implementation is an example of that.
    
    (The only truly non-generic part of the asm-generic implementation is
    the "find_zero()" function, and you could make a little-endian version
    of it.  And if the Kbuild infrastructure allowed us to pick a particular
    header file, that would be lovely)
    
    The <asm/word-at-a-time.h> functions are as follows:
    
     - WORD_AT_A_TIME_CONSTANTS: specific constants that the algorithm
       uses.
    
     - has_zero(): take a word, and determine if it has a zero byte in it.
       It gets the word, the pointer to the constant pool, and a pointer to
       an intermediate "data" field it can set.
    
       This is the "quick-and-dirty" zero tester: it's what is run inside
       the hot loops.
    
     - "prep_zero_mask()": take the word, the data that has_zero() produced,
       and the constant pool, and generate an *exact* mask of which byte had
       the first zero.  This is run directly *outside* the loop, and allows
       the "has_zero()" function to answer the "is there a zero byte"
       question without necessarily getting exactly *which* byte is the
       first one to contain a zero.
    
       If you do multiple byte lookups concurrently (eg "hash_name()", which
       looks for both NUL and '/' bytes), after you've done the prep_zero_mask()
       phase, the result of those can be or'ed together to get the "either
       or" case.
    
     - The result from "prep_zero_mask()" can then be fed into "find_zero()"
       (to find the byte offset of the first byte that was zero) or into
       "zero_bytemask()" (to find the bytemask of the bytes preceding the
       zero byte).
    
       The existence of zero_bytemask() is optional, and is not necessary
       for the normal string routines.  But dentry name hashing needs it, so
       if you enable DENTRY_WORD_AT_A_TIME you need to expose it.
    
    This changes the generic strncpy_from_user() function and the dentry
    hashing functions to use these modified word-at-a-time interfaces.  This
    gets us back to the optimized state of the x86 strncpy that we lost in
    the previous commit when moving over to the generic version.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    36126f8f
namei.c 84.4 KB