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Merge branch 'net-mitigate-retpoline-overhead'

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Paolo Abeni says:

====================
net: mitigate retpoline overhead

The spectre v2 counter-measures, aka retpolines, are a source of measurable
overhead[1]. We can partially address that when the function pointer refers to
a builtin symbol resorting to a list of tests vs well-known builtin function and
direct calls.

Experimental results show that replacing a single indirect call via
retpoline with several branches and a direct call gives performance gains
even when multiple branches are added - 5 or more, as reported in [2].

This may lead to some uglification around the indirect calls. In netconf 2018
Eric Dumazet described a technique to hide the most relevant part of the needed
boilerplate with some macro help.

This series is a [re-]implementation of such idea, exposing the introduced
helpers in a new header file. They are later leveraged to avoid the indirect
call overhead in the GRO path, when possible.

Overall this gives > 10% performance improvement for UDP GRO benchmark and
smaller but measurable for TCP syn flood.

The added infra can be used in follow-up patches to cope with retpoline overhead
in other points of the networking stack (e.g. at the qdisc layer) and possibly
even in other subsystems.

v2  -> v3:
 - fix build error with CONFIG_IPV6=m

v1  -> v2:
 - list explicitly the builtin function names in INDIRECT_CALL_*(),
   as suggested by Ed Cree
 - expand the recipients list

rfc -> v1:
 - use branch prediction hints, as suggested by Eric

[1] http://vger.kernel.org/netconf2018_files/PaoloAbeni_netconf2018.pdf
[2] https://linuxplumbersconf.org/event/2/contributions/99/attachments/98/117/lpc18_paper_af_xdp_perf-v2.pdf
====================

Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
This commit is contained in:
David S. Miller 2018-12-15 13:23:03 -08:00
commit bedf3b3320
9 changed files with 136 additions and 22 deletions
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