The most expensive part of decimal conversion is the divisions by 10
(albeit done using reciprocal multiplication with appropriately chosen
constants).  I decided to see if one could eliminate around half of
these multiplications by emitting two digits at a time, at the cost of a
200 byte lookup table, and it does indeed seem like there is something
to be gained, especially on 64 bits.  Microbenchmarking shows
improvements ranging from -50% (for numbers uniformly distributed in [0,
2^64-1]) to -25% (for numbers heavily biased toward the smaller end, a
more realistic distribution).

On a larger scale, perf shows that top, one of the big consumers of /proc
data, uses 0.5-1.0% fewer cpu cycles.

I had to jump through some hoops to get the 32 bit code to compile and run
on my 64 bit machine, so I'm not sure how relevant these numbers are, but
just for comparison the microbenchmark showed improvements between -30%
and -10%.

The bloat-o-meter costs are around 150 bytes (the generated code is a
little smaller, so it's not the full 200 bytes) on both 32 and 64 bit.
I'm aware that extra cache misses won't show up in a microbenchmark as
used above, but on the other hand decimal conversions often happen in bulk
(for example in the case of top).

I have of course tested that the new code generates the same output as the
old, for both the first and last 1e10 numbers in [0,2^64-1] and 4e9
'random' numbers in-between.

Test and verification code on github: https://github.com/Villemoes/dec

.

Signed-off-by: Rasmus Villemoes <linux@rasmusvillemoes.dk>
Tested-by: Jeff Epler <jepler@unpythonic.net>
Cc: "Peter Zijlstra (Intel)" <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>