An Improved Linux MEMSET Is Being Tackled For Possibly Better Performance

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers.

Petkov this week published his initial patch for better optimizing the memset function that is used for filling memory with a constant byte.

The new memset approach is talked at length in this kernel mailing list message.

Veteran kernel developer Ingo Molnar was quick to comment and brought up that the improvements could offer performance implications. "That looks exciting - I'm wondering what effects this has on code footprint - for example defconfig vmlinux code size, and what the average per call site footprint impact is? If the footprint effect is acceptable, then I'd expect this to improve performance, especially in hot loops."

It will be interesting to see where this work leads.