Commits
Rasmus Villemoes committed 1c94984396d
vfs: make sure struct filename->iname is word-aligned I noticed that offsetof(struct filename, iname) is actually 28 on 64 bit platforms, so we always pass an unaligned pointer to strncpy_from_user. This is mostly a problem for those 64 bit platforms without HAVE_EFFICIENT_UNALIGNED_ACCESS, but even on x86_64, unaligned accesses carry a penalty. A user-space microbenchmark doing nothing but strncpy_from_user from the same (aligned) source string runs about 5% faster when the destination is aligned. That number increases to 20% when the string is long enough (~32 bytes) that we cross a cache line boundary - that's for example the case for about half the files a "git status" in a kernel tree ends up stat'ing. This won't make any real-life workloads 5%, or even 1%, faster, but path lookup is common enough that cutting even a few cycles should be worthwhile. So ensure we always pass an aligned destination pointer to strncpy_from_user. Instead of explicit padding, simply swap the refcnt and aname members, as suggested by Al Viro. Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>