C - fastest method to swap two memory blocks of equal size?

Question

What is the fastest way to swap two non-overlapping memory areas of equal size? Say, I need to swap (t_Some *a) with (t_Some *b). Considering space-tim

Answer 1

If the 2 memory areas are large and fit in integer number of memory pages then you can swap their Page Table Entries in order to swap their contents without using memcpy() or XORs.

In theory, with two large 2MiB pages, you need to write only 16 bytes of paging structures to swap their mapping in the virtual address space ...and hence their contents, too.

1GiB pages are possible on x86-64 CPUs in 64-bit mode and content of 2 such 1GiB memory blocks can also be swapped with writing only several bytes of paging structures.

The caveat of this method is that the access to paging structures requires Kernel Mode privileges or using shared memory mapping functions from User Mode.

With recent Meltdown patches (KPTI), transitioning to Kernel Mode from User Mode has become much more expensive. Probably too expensive to make 4kiB memory page swapps competitive with memcpy()...but if you have 2MB or larger memory blocks to swap, then swapping their Paging Structures is faster.