Amit: How new-lines affect the Linux kernel performance

Nadav Amit decided to dig into why some small kernel functions were not being inlined by GCC; the result is a detailed investigation into how these things can go wrong. "Ignoring the assembly shenanigans that this code uses, we can see that in practice it generates a single ud2 instruction. However, the compiler considers this code to be 'big' and consequently oftentimes does not inline functions that use WARN() or similar functions. The reason turns to be the newline characters (marked as '\n' above). The kernel compiler, GCC, is unaware to the code size that will be generated by the inline assembly. It therefore tries to estimate its size based on newline characters and statement separators (';' on x86)."

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