Excerpts from Christophe Leroy's message of February 9, 2021 1:10 am:

By saving the pointer pointing to thread_info.flags, gcc copies r2
in a non-volatile register.

We know 'current' doesn't change, so avoid that intermediaite pointer.

Reduces null_syscall benchmark by 2 cycles (322 => 320 cycles)

On PPC64, gcc seems to know that 'current' is not changing, and it keeps
it in a non volatile register to avoid multiple read of 'current' in paca.

Signed-off-by: Christophe Leroy <redacted>

What if you did this?

---
 arch/powerpc/include/asm/current.h | 13 ++++++++-----
 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/current.h b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/current.h
index bbfb94800415..59ab327972a5 100644
--- a/arch/powerpc/include/asm/current.h
+++ b/arch/powerpc/include/asm/current.h

@@ -23,16 +23,19 @@ static inline struct task_struct *get_current(void)
 
 	return task;
 }
-#define current	get_current()
 
 #else
 
-/*
- * We keep `current' in r2 for speed.
- */
-register struct task_struct *current asm ("r2");
+static inline struct task_struct *get_current(void)
+{
+	register struct task_struct *task asm ("r2");
+
+	return task;
+}
 
 #endif
 
+#define current	get_current()
+
 #endif /* __KERNEL__ */
 #endif /* _ASM_POWERPC_CURRENT_H */

--