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Likely unlikely()sLikely unlikely()sPosted Dec 18, 2010 20:54 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: Likely unlikely()s by cras Parent article: Likely unlikely()s
dmk's basic idea seems valuable, but the example is bad. And cras seems to have misread that example. We need a better example. The problem with what dmk writes ("we would want to get the decision really fast") is that likely() doesn't affect how fast the test is. It affects how fast what you do as a result of that test is. If the test is world_continues and you want to respond quickly when it does, then the truth is the right way to go: world_continues is likely, and that's how you want to annotate it. I believe cras assumes we want to respond quickly if the world is ending, because it isn't really ending -- we can save it. That's not what dmk described: he said the world really is ending, so all we can do is say good bye, and it just won't make any difference how slowly we do that.
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Likely unlikely()s Posted Dec 27, 2010 10:54 UTC (Mon) by tesarik (guest, #52705) [Link]
Well, let's give a better example of this. Consider a spinlock slow
path (ie. on contention):
while(unlikely(is_locked(lock)))
Although it's likely that the lock is held many times before we can take it,
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