37d0ec34d1
Patch series "lib/sort & lib/list_sort: faster and smaller", v2. Because CONFIG_RETPOLINE has made indirect calls much more expensive, I thought I'd try to reduce the number made by the library sort functions. The first three patches apply to lib/sort.c. Patch #1 is a simple optimization. The built-in swap has special cases for aligned 4- and 8-byte objects. But those are almost never used; most calls to sort() work on larger structures, which fall back to the byte-at-a-time loop. This generalizes them to aligned *multiples* of 4 and 8 bytes. (If nothing else, it saves an awful lot of energy by not thrashing the store buffers as much.) Patch #2 grabs a juicy piece of low-hanging fruit. I agree that nice simple solid heapsort is preferable to more complex algorithms (sorry, Andrey), but it's possible to implement heapsort with far fewer comparisons (50% asymptotically, 25-40% reduction for realistic sizes) than the way it's been done up to now. And with some care, the code ends up smaller, as well. This is the "big win" patch. Patch #3 adds the same sort of indirect call bypass that has been added to the net code of late. The great majority of the callers use the builtin swap functions, so replace the indirect call to sort_func with a (highly preditable) series of if() statements. Rather surprisingly, this decreased code size, as the swap functions were inlined and their prologue & epilogue code eliminated. lib/list_sort.c is a bit trickier, as merge sort is already close to optimal, and we don't want to introduce triumphs of theory over practicality like the Ford-Johnson merge-insertion sort. Patch #4, without changing the algorithm, chops 32% off the code size and removes the part[MAX_LIST_LENGTH+1] pointer array (and the corresponding upper limit on efficiently sortable input size). Patch #5 improves the algorithm. The previous code is already optimal for power-of-two (or slightly smaller) size inputs, but when the input size is just over a power of 2, there's a very unbalanced final merge. There are, in the literature, several algorithms which solve this, but they all depend on the "breadth-first" merge order which was replaced by commit |
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| README | ||
README
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.