Re: [PATCH 0/7] preempt_count rework -v2

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 07:43:42PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 7:20 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I split the thing up into two macros GEN_UNARY_RMWcc and
> > GEN_BINARY_RMWcc which ends up being more readable as well as smaller
> > code overall.
> 
> Yes, that looks like the right abstraction level. Powerful without
> being complicated.

> That said, the very same memory clobber may be what makes this whole
> approach a loss, if it causes gcc to do tons of reloads or other
> random things.

Random things below, not sure why

> For other cases? Who knows.. A lot of the "change and test atomically"
> things have the same containment need, so it might not be a problem.

Right, all atomic ops already contain a memory clobber to go along with
their memory barrier semantics.

So I did a defconfig build without the patch and with the patch and got
a significant size increase:

      text    data     bss   filename
   11173443 1423736 1183744 defconfig-build/vmlinux.before
   11174516 1423736 1183744 defconfig-build/vmlinux.after

I then undid all the bitop conversions that added the extra memory
clobber and got:

   11174204 1423736 1183744 defconfig-build/vmlinux.after

Which is still a significant increase, so I had a look at what GCC
generates, for mm/rmap.c, which uses quite a few atomic_*_and_test(),
functions I got:

   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   8675       1      16    8692    21f4 defconfig-build/mm/rmap.o
   8739       1      16    8756    2234 defconfig-build/mm/rmap.o

So the increase is there too, doing a objdump -D on them the first
difference is:

0000000000000660 <do_page_add_anon_rmap>:
     660:	55                   	push   %rbp
     661:	48 89 e5             	mov    %rsp,%rbp
     664:	48 83 ec 20          	sub    $0x20,%rsp
     668:	48 89 5d f0          	mov    %rbx,-0x10(%rbp)
     66c:	4c 89 65 f8          	mov    %r12,-0x8(%rbp)
     670:	48 89 fb             	mov    %rdi,%rbx
     673:	f0 ff 47 18          	lock incl 0x18(%rdi)
     677:	0f 94 c0             	sete   %al
     67a:	84 c0                	test   %al,%al
     67c:	75 12                	jne    690 <do_page_add_anon_rmap+0x30>
     67e:	48 8b 5d f0          	mov    -0x10(%rbp),%rbx
     682:	4c 8b 65 f8          	mov    -0x8(%rbp),%r12
     686:	c9                   	leaveq 

vs.:

0000000000000660 <do_page_add_anon_rmap>:
     660:	55                   	push   %rbp
     661:	48 89 e5             	mov    %rsp,%rbp
     664:	48 83 ec 20          	sub    $0x20,%rsp
     668:	48 89 5d e0          	mov    %rbx,-0x20(%rbp)
     66c:	4c 89 65 e8          	mov    %r12,-0x18(%rbp)
     670:	48 89 fb             	mov    %rdi,%rbx
     673:	4c 89 6d f0          	mov    %r13,-0x10(%rbp)
     677:	4c 89 75 f8          	mov    %r14,-0x8(%rbp)
     67b:	f0 ff 47 18          	lock incl 0x18(%rdi)
     67f:	74 17                	je     698 <do_page_add_anon_rmap+0x38>
     681:	48 8b 5d e0          	mov    -0x20(%rbp),%rbx
     685:	4c 8b 65 e8          	mov    -0x18(%rbp),%r12
     689:	4c 8b 6d f0          	mov    -0x10(%rbp),%r13
     68d:	4c 8b 75 f8          	mov    -0x8(%rbp),%r14
     691:	c9                   	leaveq 

For some obscure (to me) reason the new fangled asm goto construct
generates a bunch of extra MOVs.

OTOH the good news is that a kernel with that patch applied does indeed
boot properly on real hardware.
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