Commit 7d12e780 authored by David Howells's avatar David Howells Committed by David Howells
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IRQ: Maintain regs pointer globally rather than passing to IRQ handlers

Maintain a per-CPU global "struct pt_regs *" variable which can be used instead
of passing regs around manually through all ~1800 interrupt handlers in the
Linux kernel.

The regs pointer is used in few places, but it potentially costs both stack
space and code to pass it around.  On the FRV arch, removing the regs parameter
from all the genirq function results in a 20% speed up of the IRQ exit path
(ie: from leaving timer_interrupt() to leaving do_IRQ()).

Where appropriate, an arch may override the generic storage facility and do
something different with the variable.  On FRV, for instance, the address is
maintained in GR28 at all times inside the kernel as part of general exception
handling.

Having looked over the code, it appears that the parameter may be handed down
through up to twenty or so layers of functions.  Consider a USB character
device attached to a USB hub, attached to a USB controller that posts its
interrupts throug...
parent da482792
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