Re: [google 4.7] atomic update of profile counters (issue6965050)

[Jan Hubicka <hubicka@ucw.cz>]

> On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Andrew Pinski <pinskia@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 12:08 PM, Rong Xu <xur@google.com> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > This patch adds the supprot of atomic update the profile counters.
> > > Tested with google internal benchmarks and fdo kernel build.
> >
> > I think you should use the __atomic_ functions instead of __sync_
> > functions as they allow better performance for simple counters as you
> > can use __ATOMIC_RELAXED.
> 
> You are right. I think __ATOMIC_RELAXED should be OK here.
> Thanks for the suggestion.
> 
> >
> > And this would be useful for the trunk also.  I was going to implement
> > this exact thing this week but some other important stuff came up.
> 
> I'll post trunk patch later.

Yes, I like that patch, too. Even if the costs are quite high (and this is why
atomic updates was sort of voted down in the past) the alternative of using TLS
has problems with too-much per-thread memory.

While there are even more alternatives, like recording the changes and
commmiting them in blocks (say at function return), I guess some solution is
better than no solution.

Thanks,
Honza