I have no real information on the topic, but to me it looks like a "why not" optimization. It was probably pretty cheap to put into the hardware (seeing as it was already an ARM extension), the engineers probably figured there was some risk that it would be really important for some workload, and once they had included it they might as well use it.
In other words, it's probably not necessary but was included early on out of an abundance of caution. They knew that if it turned out to be used in some binary somewhere, it would be a major performance killer.
I'd be interested in seeing a benchmark with the hardware flag turned off and the translation/optimization setup used for linux enabled. I bet the difference would be negligible.
In other words, it's probably not necessary but was included early on out of an abundance of caution. They knew that if it turned out to be used in some binary somewhere, it would be a major performance killer.
I'd be interested in seeing a benchmark with the hardware flag turned off and the translation/optimization setup used for linux enabled. I bet the difference would be negligible.