On Mon, Dec 23, 2019 at 6:31 AM Christophe Leroy
[off-list ref] wrote:

do_hres() is called from several places, so GCC doesn't inline
it at first.

do_hres() takes a struct __kernel_timespec * parameter for
passing the result. In the 32 bits case, this parameter corresponds
to a local var in the caller. In order to provide a pointer
to this structure, the caller has to put it in its stack and
do_hres() has to write the result in the stack. This is suboptimal,
especially on RISC processor like powerpc.

By making GCC inline the function, the struct __kernel_timespec
remains a local var using registers, avoiding the need to write and
read stack.

The improvement is significant on powerpc.

I'm okay with it, mainly because I don't expect many workloads to have
more than one copy of the code hot at the same time.