From: Eric Dumazet <redacted>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 09:00:44 +0200

This adds quite large number of conditional jumps, as
skb_header_pointer() is heavily used in the stack.

There is only one, in __skb_header_pointer(), testing "!skb" when we
have to take the slow path of copying from a non-linear area.

The NULL check could even be moved into skb_copy_bits() so that it
would not be inlined.  It should be unlikely() (or even WARN_ON()),
and thus terribly easily to be predicted properly all the time.

We could even pass around a "sentinel" global const SKB for these
cases that would simply make skb_copy_bits() return immediately (just
having skb->len == 0 would do the trick) even if we accidently got
there with one.

Then there would be no extra conditional jumps.