Re: [PATCH -next 0/2] fs/epoll: loosen irq safety when possible

[Davidlohr Bueso]

On Thu, 06 Sep 2018, Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 01:05:59PM -0700, Davidlohr Bueso wrote:
> > On Fri, 20 Jul 2018, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> > >I'm surprised.  Is spin_lock_irqsave() significantly more expensive
> > >than spin_lock_irq()?  Relative to all the other stuff those functions
> > >are doing?  If so, how come?  Some architectural thing makes
> > >local_irq_save() much more costly than local_irq_disable()?
> >
> > For example, if you compare x86 native_restore_fl() to xen_restore_fl(),
> > the cost of Xen is much higher.
>
> Xen is a moot argument. IIRC the point is that POPF (as used by
> *irqrestore()) is a very expensive operation because it changes all
> flags and thus has very 'difficult' instruction dependencies, killing
> the front end reorder and generating a giant bubble in the pipeline.
>
> Similarly, I suppose PUSHF is an expensive instruction because it needs
> all the flags 'stable' and thus needs to wait for a fair number of prior
> instructions to retire before it can get on with it.
>
> Combined the whole PUSHF + POPF is _far_ more expensive than STI + CLI,
> because the latter only has dependencies on instructions that muck about
> with IF -- not that many.

ack.

In fact it turns out that my Xen numbers for this patch were actually
native (popf), and not the xen_restore_fl() as it was using hvm and
not paravirt.

Thanks,
Davidlohr