[PATCH] ppc64: no prefetch for NULL pointers
authorOlof Johansson <olof@austin.ibm.com>
Sat, 16 Apr 2005 22:24:38 +0000 (15:24 -0700)
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org>
Sat, 16 Apr 2005 22:24:38 +0000 (15:24 -0700)
For prefetches of NULL (as when walking a short linked list), PPC64 will in
some cases take a performance hit.  The hardware needs to do the TLB walk,
and said walk will always miss, which means (up to) two L2 misses as
penalty.  This seems to hurt overall performance, so for NULL pointers skip
the prefetch alltogether.

Signed-off-by: Olof Johansson <olof@austin.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

No differences found