• Paul Mackerras's avatar
    [POWERPC] Add fast little-endian switch system call · 745a14cc
    Paul Mackerras authored
    This adds a system call on 64-bit platforms for switching between
    little-endian and big-endian modes that is much faster than doing a
    prctl call.  This system call is handled as a special case right at
    the start of the system call entry code, and because it is a special
    case, it uses a system call number which is out of the range of
    normal system calls, namely 0x1ebe.
    
    Measurements with lmbench on a 4.2GHz POWER6 showed no measurable
    change in the speed of normal system calls with this patch.
    
    Switching endianness with this new system call takes around 60ns on a
    4.2GHz POWER6, compared with around 300ns to switch endian mode with a
    prctl.  This can provide a significant performance advantage for
    emulators for little-endian architectures that want to switch between
    big-endian and little-endian mode frequently, e.g. because they are
    generating instructions sequences on the fly and they want to run
    those sequences in little-endian mode.
    
    The other thing about this system call is that it doesn't clobber as
    many registers as a normal system call.  It only clobbers r12.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
    745a14cc
head_64.S 40.2 KB