Re: [PATCH 0/6] x86-64: Micro-optimize vclock_gettime

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 4:14 PM, Andi Kleen <andi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 04:10:22PM -0400, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
>> I ran Ingo's time-warp-test w/ 6, 7, and 8 threads on Sandy Bridge and
>> on a Xeon 5600 series chip.  My C2D laptop thinks that its TSC halts
>> in idle and my only AMD system has unsynchronized TSCs.
>
> I think you should have coverage on more systems. The original
> problems that motivated the barriers were on older K8 AMD systems.
>
> You can ask people on l-k to run such tests for you if you don't
> have the hardware.

Will do, once v2 is ready.

>
>> > I did a similar attempt recently for the in kernel timers.
>> > You won't see any difference in a micro benchmark loop, but you may
>> > in a workload that dirties lots of cache between timer calls.
>>
>> For CLOCK_REALTIME they're already in one cache line.  I tried the
>> prefetch and couldn't measure a speedup even after playing with
>
> Did you run a cache pig between the calls? With a tight loop it's obviously
> useless.

No, but I clflushed the cache line with vsyscall_gtod_data in it.  I
think the result was just too noisy.

>
>> Agreed.  In fact, I could do both in one fell swoop: have a flag for
>> the mode and have one option be "just issue the syscall."  Static
>> branch stuff scares me because this stuff runs in userspace and, in
>> theory, userspace might have COWed the page with this code in it.
>
> The vdso is never cowed.

This program successfully gets SIGTRAP.  I assume COW is involved.

#include <dlfcn.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/mman.h>
#include <time.h>

int main()
{
  volatile char *vclock_gettime;
  struct timespec t;

  void *vdso = dlopen("linux-vdso.so.1", RTLD_NOW | RTLD_NOLOAD);
  if (!vdso) {
    fprintf(stderr, "dlopen: %s\n", dlerror());
    return 1;
  }
  vclock_gettime = dlsym(vdso, "clock_gettime");
  if (!vclock_gettime) {
    fprintf(stderr, "dlsym: %s\n", dlerror());
    return 1;
  }

  if (mprotect((void*)((unsigned long)vclock_gettime & ~0xFFFUL),
	       4096, PROT_READ | PROT_WRITE | PROT_EXEC) != 0) {
    perror("mprotect");
    return 1;
  }

  *vclock_gettime = 0xcc;  /* breakpoint */
  clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, &t);

  return 0;
}

--Andy
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