Re: [Xen-devel] Performance overhead of paravirt_ops on nativeidentified

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Fri May 15 2009 - 14:51:33 EST


Jan Beulich wrote:
A patch for the pv-ops kernel would require some time. What I can give you
right away - just for reference - are the sources we currently use in our kernel:
attached.

Hm, I see. Putting a call out to a pv-ops function in the ticket lock slow path looks pretty straightforward. The need for an extra lock on the contended unlock side is a bit unfortunate; have you measured to see what hit that has? Seems to me like you could avoid the problem by using per-cpu storage rather than stack storage (though you'd need to copy the per-cpu data to stack when handling a nested spinlock).

What's the thinking behind the xen_spin_adjust() stuff?

static __always_inline void __ticket_spin_lock(raw_spinlock_t *lock) { unsigned int token, count; bool free; __ticket_spin_lock_preamble; if (unlikely(!free)) token = xen_spin_adjust(lock, token); do { count = 1 << 10; __ticket_spin_lock_body; } while (unlikely(!count) && !xen_spin_wait(lock, token)); }


How does this work? Doesn't it always go into the slowpath loop even if the preamble got the lock with no contention?

J
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