Re: [PATCH] i386-pda UP optimization

[Eric Dumazet]

Jeremy Fitzhardinge a Ãcrit :
> Eric Dumazet wrote:
> > I did *lot* of reboots of my Dell D610 machine, with some trivial benchmarks 
> > using : pipe/write()/read, umask(), or getppid(), using or not oprofile.
> >
> > I managed to avoid reloading %gs in sysenter_entry .
> > (avoiding the two instructions : movl $(__KERNEL_PDA), %edx; movl %edx, %gs
> >
> > I could not avoid reloading %gs in system_call, I dont know why, but modern 
> > glibc use sysenter so I dont care :)
> >
> > I confirm I got better results with my patched kernel in all tests I've done.
> >
> > umask : 12.64 s instead of 12.90 s
> > getppid : 13.37 s instead of 13.72 s
> > pipe/read/write : 9.10 s instead of 9.52 s
> >
> > (I got very different results in umask() bench, patching it not to use xchg(), 
> > since this instruction is expensive on x86 and really change oprofile 
> > results. I will submit a patch for this.
> >   
>
> Could you go into more detail about what you're actually measuring
> here?  Is it 10,000,000 loops of the single syscall?  pipe/read/write
> suggests that you're doing at least 2 syscalls per loop, but it takes
> the smallest elapsed time.

for umask/getppid(), its a basic loop with 100.000.000 iterations
for read/write(), loop with 10.000.000 iterations
> What are you using as your time reference?  Real time?  Process time?

elapsed time (/usr/bin/time ./prog)
10 runs, and the minimum time is taken.

> For umask/getppid, assuming you're just running 1e7 iterations, you're
> seeing a difference of 25 and 35ns per iteration difference.  I wonder
> why it would be different for different syscalls; I would expect it to
> be a constant overhead either way.  Certainly these numbers are much
> larger than I saw when I benchmarked pda-vs-nopda using lmbench's null
> syscall (getppid) test; I saw an overall 9ns difference in null syscall
> time on my Core Duo run at 1GHz.  What's your CPU and speed?

Its a 1.6GHz Pentium-M CPU (Dell D610)

> One possibility is a cache miss on the gdt while reloading %gs.  I've
> been planning on a patch to rearrange the gdt in order to pack all the
> commonly used segment descriptors into one or two cache lines so that
> all the segment register reloads can be done with a minimum of cache
> misses.  It would be interesting for you to replace the:
>
>     movl $(__KERNEL_PDA), %edx; movl %edx, %gs
>
> with an appropriate read of the gdt entry, hm, which is a bit complex to
> find.

Hum... Do you mean a cache miss every time we do a syscall ? What could 
invalidate this cache exactly ?


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