On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 02:42:20PM -0400, firstname.lastname@example.org wrote:
> > This requires each CPU to remember the last owner of FPU.
> > In order to support possible process migration cases in a SMP
> > system, each process also needs to remember the processor
> > on which it used FPU last. A process has a valid live FPU
> > context on a CPU if those two variables match to each other.
> > Therefore we can avoid unnecessary restoring FPU context.
> > Fairly complex in implementation.
> I'd argue for something between 2 & 3. Always save FPU state, and if
> you know the state has been preserved for the next run, skip the
Determining whether the current FPU context is valid for the new
process is not easy. It requires last_task_used_math like variable
for each CPU.
> I'm a bit leery of the whole "don't restore FPU state on context switch
> until you use the FPU again" idea as it's added complexity
Quite easy to implement. Just turn off ST0_CU1 bit in the status register
saved in the kernel stack when a process is switched off. Therefore
next use of FPU will cause a trap and do_cpu() does the normal thing.
> and I'm not
> at all sure you're going to see any measurable performance gain out of
I think this gives a big performance improvement because most processes
don't use FPU during their runs but they all have used_math flag set!