Re: [RFC/PATCH] Make powerpc64 use __thread for per-cpu variables

From: Paul Mackerras <redacted>
Date: Wed, 10 May 2006 16:29:59 +1000

I have moved current, smp_processor_id and a couple of other things to
per-cpu variables, and that results in the kernel text being about 8k
smaller than without any of these __thread patches.  Performance seems
to be very slightly better but it's hard to be sure that the change is
statistically significant, from the measurements I've done so far.

That first cache line of current_thread_info() should be so hot that
it's probably just fine to use current_thread_info()->task since
you're just doing a mask on a fixed register (r1) to implement that.