[PATCH 2/2] x86, perf: Optimize stack walk user accesses

[Andi Kleen]

From: Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Change the perf user stack walking to use the new __copy_from_user_nmi,
and split each access into word sized transfer sizes. This allows
to inline the complete access and optimize it all into a single load.

The main advantage is that this avoids the overhead of double page faults.
When normal copy_from_user fails it reexecutes the copy to compute
an accurate number of non copied bytes. This leads to executing
the expensive page fault twice.

While walking stacks having a fault at some point is relatively
common (typically when some part of the program isn't compiled
with frame pointers), so this is a large overhead.

With the optimized copies we avoid this problem because they
only do all accesses once. And of course they're much faster too
when the access does not fault because they're just single instructions
instead of complex function calls.

While profiling a kernel build with -g, the patch brings down
the average time of the PMI handler from 966ns to 552ns (-43%)

Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
 arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c | 15 +++++++++++++--
 1 file changed, 13 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c
index 4562cf0..15bf8b3 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/cpu/perf_event.c
@@ -2255,7 +2255,12 @@ perf_callchain_user32(struct pt_regs *regs, struct perf_callchain_entry *entry)
 		frame.next_frame     = 0;
 		frame.return_address = 0;
 
-		bytes = copy_from_user_nmi(&frame, fp, sizeof(frame));
+		if (!access_ok(VERIFY_READ, fp, 8))
+			break;
+		bytes = __copy_from_user_nmi(&frame.next_frame, fp, 4);
+		if (bytes != 0)
+			break;
+		bytes = __copy_from_user_nmi(&frame.return_address, fp+4, 4);
 		if (bytes != 0)
 			break;
 
@@ -2307,7 +2312,13 @@ perf_callchain_user(struct perf_callchain_entry *entry, struct pt_regs *regs)
 		frame.next_frame	     = NULL;
 		frame.return_address = 0;
 
-		bytes = copy_from_user_nmi(&frame, fp, sizeof(frame));
+		if (!access_ok(VERIFY_READ, fp, 16))
+			break;
+
+		bytes = __copy_from_user_nmi(&frame.next_frame, fp, 8);
+		if (bytes != 0)
+			break;
+		bytes = __copy_from_user_nmi(&frame.return_address, fp+8, 8);
 		if (bytes != 0)
 			break;
 
-- 
2.4.3

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