On Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 12:05:06PM -0700, Andi Kleen wrote:
However, the history of their being together comes from
9bebe9e5b0f3 ("kbuild: Fix .text.unlikely placement")
which seems to indicate there was some problem with having them separated out, although I don't quite understand what the issue was from the commit message.
Separating it out is less efficient. Gives worse packing for the hot part if they are not aligned to 64byte boundaries, which they are usually not.
It also improves packing of the cold part, but that probably doesn't matter.
-Andi
Why is that? Both .text and .text.hot have alignment of 2^4 (default function alignment on x86) by default, so it doesn't seem like it should matter for packing density. Avoiding interspersing cold text among regular/hot text seems like it should be a net win.
That old commit doesn't reference efficiency -- it says there was some problem with matching when they were separated out, but there were no wildcard section names back then.
commit 9bebe9e5b0f3109a14000df25308c2971f872605 Author: Andi Kleen ak@linux.intel.com Date: Sun Jul 19 18:01:19 2015 -0700
kbuild: Fix .text.unlikely placement
When building a kernel with .text.unlikely text the unlikely text for each translation unit was put next to the main .text code in the final vmlinux.
The problem is that the linker doesn't allow more specific submatches of a section name in a different linker script statement after the main match.
So we need to move them all into one line. With that change .text.unlikely is at the end of everything again.
I also moved .text.hot into the same statement though, even though that's not strictly needed.
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen ak@linux.intel.com Signed-off-by: Michal Marek mmarek@suse.com
diff --git a/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h b/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h index 8bd374d3cf21..1781e54ea6d3 100644 --- a/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h +++ b/include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.h @@ -412,12 +412,10 @@ * during second ld run in second ld pass when generating System.map */ #define TEXT_TEXT \ ALIGN_FUNCTION(); \ - *(.text.hot) \ - *(.text .text.fixup) \ + *(.text.hot .text .text.fixup .text.unlikely) \ *(.ref.text) \ MEM_KEEP(init.text) \ MEM_KEEP(exit.text) \ - *(.text.unlikely)
/* sched.text is aling to function alignment to secure we have same