• Linus Torvalds's avatar
    i387: do not preload FPU state at task switch time · b3b0870e
    Linus Torvalds authored
    Yes, taking the trap to re-load the FPU/MMX state is expensive, but so
    is spending several days looking for a bug in the state save/restore
    code.  And the preload code has some rather subtle interactions with
    both paravirtualization support and segment state restore, so it's not
    nearly as simple as it should be.
    
    Also, now that we no longer necessarily depend on a single bit (ie
    TS_USEDFPU) for keeping track of the state of the FPU, we migth be able
    to do better.  If we are really switching between two processes that
    keep touching the FP state, save/restore is inevitable, but in the case
    of having one process that does most of the FPU usage, we may actually
    be able to do much better than the preloading.
    
    In particular, we may be able to keep track of which CPU the process ran
    on last, and also per CPU keep track of which process' FP state that CPU
    has.  For modern CPU's that don't destroy the FPU contents on save time,
    that would allow us to do a lazy restore by just re-enabling the
    existing FPU state - with no restore cost at all!
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    b3b0870e
process_64.c 15.5 KB