Thread (20 messages) 20 messages, 10 authors, 2019-02-12

Re: [PATCH 0/3] gcc-plugins: Introduce stackinit plugin

From: Alexander Popov <hidden>
Date: 2019-01-29 00:12:38
Also in: dri-devel, intel-gfx, intel-wired-lan, linux-fsdevel, linux-kbuild, linux-mm, lkml, netdev

On 23.01.2019 14:03, Kees Cook wrote:
This adds a new plugin "stackinit" that attempts to perform unconditional
initialization of all stack variables
Hello Kees! Hello everyone!

I was curious about the performance impact of the initialization of all stack
variables. So I did a very brief test with this plugin on top of 4.20.5.

hackbench on Intel Core i7-4770 showed ~0.7% slowdown.
hackbench on Kirin 620 (ARM Cortex-A53 Octa-core 1.2GHz) showed ~1.3% slowdown.

This test involves the kernel scheduler and allocator. I can't say whether they
use stack aggressively. Maybe performance tests of other subsystems (e.g.
network subsystem) can show different numbers. Did you try?

I've heard a hypothesis that the initialization of all stack variables would
pollute CPU caches, which is critical for some types of computations. Maybe some
micro-benchmarks can disprove/confirm that?

Thanks!
Best regards,
Alexander
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