tree 543f6b6ab60dd3e47af931142aa84f0ba7749d43
parent 4ae73f2d53255c388d50bf83c1681112a6f9cba1
author Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1338054197 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> 1338057220 -0700

word-at-a-time: make the interfaces truly generic

This changes the interfaces in <asm/word-at-a-time.h> to be a bit more
complicated, but a lot more generic.

In particular, it allows us to really do the operations efficiently on
both little-endian and big-endian machines, pretty much regardless of
machine details.  For example, if you can rely on a fast population
count instruction on your architecture, this will allow you to make your
optimized <asm/word-at-a-time.h> file with that.

NOTE! The "generic" version in include/asm-generic/word-at-a-time.h is
not truly generic, it actually only works on big-endian.  Why? Because
on little-endian the generic algorithms are wasteful, since you can
inevitably do better. The x86 implementation is an example of that.

(The only truly non-generic part of the asm-generic implementation is
the "find_zero()" function, and you could make a little-endian version
of it.  And if the Kbuild infrastructure allowed us to pick a particular
header file, that would be lovely)

The <asm/word-at-a-time.h> functions are as follows:

 - WORD_AT_A_TIME_CONSTANTS: specific constants that the algorithm
   uses.

 - has_zero(): take a word, and determine if it has a zero byte in it.
   It gets the word, the pointer to the constant pool, and a pointer to
   an intermediate "data" field it can set.

   This is the "quick-and-dirty" zero tester: it's what is run inside
   the hot loops.

 - "prep_zero_mask()": take the word, the data that has_zero() produced,
   and the constant pool, and generate an *exact* mask of which byte had
   the first zero.  This is run directly *outside* the loop, and allows
   the "has_zero()" function to answer the "is there a zero byte"
   question without necessarily getting exactly *which* byte is the
   first one to contain a zero.

   If you do multiple byte lookups concurrently (eg "hash_name()", which
   looks for both NUL and '/' bytes), after you've done the prep_zero_mask()
   phase, the result of those can be or'ed together to get the "either
   or" case.

 - The result from "prep_zero_mask()" can then be fed into "find_zero()"
   (to find the byte offset of the first byte that was zero) or into
   "zero_bytemask()" (to find the bytemask of the bytes preceding the
   zero byte).

   The existence of zero_bytemask() is optional, and is not necessary
   for the normal string routines.  But dentry name hashing needs it, so
   if you enable DENTRY_WORD_AT_A_TIME you need to expose it.

This changes the generic strncpy_from_user() function and the dentry
hashing functions to use these modified word-at-a-time interfaces.  This
gets us back to the optimized state of the x86 strncpy that we lost in
the previous commit when moving over to the generic version.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>