Monday, January 31, 2011

softint overhead: splx .vs. interrupt

Given how many splx calls the kernel does, what's less overhead?

Checking for pending softint in splx or just blasting COP_0_STATUS and letting an interrupt happen?
An interrupts is several hundred instruction. Testing for a softint is a few but it also makes splx a nested function and calling softint_process would be another dozen or instructions. Guessing, I'd say there's a few hundred splx between each softintr so that maybe the interrupt is cheaper. Probably should measure that...


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