Re: Percpu variables, benchmarking, and performance weirdness

[Christopher Lameter]

On Fri, 20 Dec 2019, Tejun Heo wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 10:34:20AM +0100, Jesper Dangaard Brouer wrote:
> > > So, my question to the uarch/percpu folks out there: Why are percpu
> > > accesses (%gs segment register) more expensive than regular global
> > > variables in this scenario.
> >
> > I'm also VERY interested in knowing the answer to above question!?
> > (Adding LKML to reach more people)
>
> No idea.  One difference is that percpu accesses are through vmap area
> which is mapped using 4k pages while global variable would be accessed
> through the fault linear mapping.  Maybe you're getting hit by tlb
> pressure?

And there are some accesses from remote processors to per cpu ares of
other cpus. If those are in the same cacheline then those will cause
additional latencies.