The kernel.h is a set of something which is not related to each other and often used in non-crossed compilation units, especially when drivers need only one or two macro definitions from it.
Here is the split of container_of(). The goals are the following: - untwist the dependency hell a bit - drop kernel.h inclusion where it's only used for container_of() - speed up C preprocessing.
People, like Greg KH and Miguel Ojeda, were asking about the latter. Read below the methodology and test setup with outcome numbers.
The methodology =============== The question here is how to measure in the more or less clean way the C preprocessing time when building a project like Linux kernel. To answer it, let's look around and see what tools do we have that may help. Aha, here is ccache tool that seems quite plausible to be used. Its core idea is to preprocess C file, count hash (MD4) and compare to ones that are in the cache. If found, return the object file, avoiding compilation stage.
Taking into account the property of the ccache, configure and use it in the below steps:
1. Configure kernel with allyesconfig
2. Make it with `make` to be sure that the cache is filled with the latest data. I.o.w. warm up the cache.
3. Run `make -s` (silent mode to reduce the influence of the unrelated things, like console output) 10 times and measure 'real' time spent.
4. Repeat 1-3 for each patch or patch set to get data sets before and after.
When we get the raw data, calculating median will show us the number. Comparing them before and after we will see the difference.
The setup ========= I have used the Intel x86_64 server platform (see partial output of `lscpu` below):
$ lscpu Architecture: x86_64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Address sizes: 46 bits physical, 48 bits virtual Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 88 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-87 Vendor ID: GenuineIntel Model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2699 v4 @ 2.20GHz CPU family: 6 Model: 79 Thread(s) per core: 2 Core(s) per socket: 22 Socket(s): 2 Stepping: 1 CPU max MHz: 3600.0000 CPU min MHz: 1200.0000 ... Caches (sum of all): L1d: 1.4 MiB (44 instances) L1i: 1.4 MiB (44 instances) L2: 11 MiB (44 instances) L3: 110 MiB (2 instances) NUMA: NUMA node(s): 2 NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-21,44-65 NUMA node1 CPU(s): 22-43,66-87 Vulnerabilities: Itlb multihit: KVM: Mitigation: Split huge pages L1tf: Mitigation; PTE Inversion; VMX conditional cache flushes, SMT vulnerable Mds: Mitigation; Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable Meltdown: Mitigation; PTI Spec store bypass: Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp Spectre v1: Mitigation; usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization Spectre v2: Mitigation; Full generic retpoline, IBPB conditional, IBRS_FW, STIBP conditional, RSB filling Tsx async abort: Mitigation; Clear CPU buffers; SMT vulnerable
With the following GCC:
$ gcc --version gcc (Debian 10.3.0-11) 10.3.0
The commands I have run during the measurement were:
rm -rf $O make O=$O allyesconfig time make O=$O -s -j64 # this step has been measured
The raw data and median ======================= Before patch 2 (yes, I have measured the only patch 2 effect) in the series (the data is sorted by time):
real 2m8.794s real 2m11.183s real 2m11.235s real 2m11.639s real 2m11.960s real 2m12.014s real 2m12.609s real 2m13.177s real 2m13.462s real 2m19.132s
After patch 2 has been applied:
real 2m8.536s real 2m8.776s real 2m9.071s real 2m9.459s real 2m9.531s real 2m9.610s real 2m10.356s real 2m10.430s real 2m11.117s real 2m11.885s
Median values are: 131.987s before 129.571s after
We see the steady speedup as of 1.83%.
Andy Shevchenko (4): kernel.h: Drop unneeded <linux/kernel.h> inclusion from other headers kernel.h: Split out container_of() and typeof_member() macros lib/rhashtable: Replace kernel.h with the necessary inclusions kunit: Replace kernel.h with the necessary inclusions
include/kunit/test.h | 14 ++++++++++++-- include/linux/container_of.h | 37 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ include/linux/kernel.h | 31 +----------------------------- include/linux/kobject.h | 1 + include/linux/list.h | 6 ++++-- include/linux/llist.h | 4 +++- include/linux/plist.h | 5 ++++- include/linux/rwsem.h | 1 - include/linux/spinlock.h | 1 - include/media/media-entity.h | 3 ++- lib/radix-tree.c | 6 +++++- lib/rhashtable.c | 7 ++++++- 12 files changed, 75 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-) create mode 100644 include/linux/container_of.h