• Feng Tang's avatar
    ./Makefile: add debug option to enable function aligned on 32 bytes · 09c60546
    Feng Tang authored
    Recently 0day reported many strange performance changes (regression or
    improvement), in which there was no obvious relation between the culprit
    commit and the benchmark at the first look, and it causes people to doubt
    the test itself is wrong.
    
    Upon further check, many of these cases are caused by the change to the
    alignment of kernel text or data, as whole text/data of kernel are linked
    together, change in one domain may affect alignments of other domains.
    
    gcc has an option '-falign-functions=n' to force text aligned, and with
    that option enabled, some of those performance changes will be gone, like
    [1][2][3].
    
    Add this option so that developers and 0day can easily find performance
    bump caused by text alignment change, as tracking these strange bump is
    quite time consuming.  Though it can't help in other cases like data
    alignment changes like [4].
    
    Following is some size data for v5.7 kernel built with a RHEL config used
    in 0day:
    
        t...
    09c60546
Makefile 61.8 KB