On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 10:05:16AM +0800, Kai Shen wrote:Operations like "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1" ?
On 2021/4/14 18:41, Catalin Marinas wrote:
On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 05:25:43PM +0800, Kai Shen wrote:
Performance decreases happen in __arch_clear_user when this
function is not correctly aligned on HISI-HIP08 arm64 SOC which
fetches 32 bytes (8 instructions) from icache with a 32-bytes
aligned end address. As a result, if the hot loop is not 32-bytes
aligned, it may take more icache fetches which leads to decrease
in performance.
Dump of assembler code for function __arch_clear_user:
0xffff0000809e3f10 : nop
0xffff0000809e3f14 : mov x2, x1
0xffff0000809e3f18 : subs x1, x1, #0x8
0xffff0000809e3f1c : b.mi 0xffff0000809e3f30 <__arch_clear_user+3
----- 0xffff0000809e3f20 : str xzr, [x0],#8
hot 0xffff0000809e3f24 : nop
loop 0xffff0000809e3f28 : subs x1, x1, #0x8
----- 0xffff0000809e3f2c : b.pl 0xffff0000809e3f20 <__arch_clear_user+1
The hot loop above takes one icache fetch as the code is in one
32-bytes aligned area and the loop takes one more icache fetch
when it is not aligned like below.
0xffff0000809e4178 : str xzr, [x0],#8
0xffff0000809e417c : nop
0xffff0000809e4180 : subs x1, x1, #0x8
0xffff0000809e4184 : b.pl 0xffff0000809e4178 <__arch_clear_user+
Data collected by perf:
aligned not aligned
instructions 57733790 57739065
L1-dcache-store 14938070 13718242
L1-dcache-store-misses 349280 349869
L1-icache-loads 15380895 28500665
As we can see, L1-icache-loads almost double when the loop is not
aligned.
This problem is found in linux 4.19 on HISI-HIP08 arm64 SOC.
Not sure what the case is on other arm64 SOC, but it should do
no harm.
Signed-off-by: Kai Shen <shenkai8@xxxxxxxxxx>
Do you have a real world workload that's affected by this function?
I'm against adding alignments and nops for specific hardware
implementations. What about lots of other loops that the compiler may
generate or that we wrote in asm?
The benchmark we used which suffer performance decrease:
https://github.com/redhat-performance/libMicro
pread $OPTS -N "pread_z1k" -s 1k -I 300 -f /dev/zero
pread $OPTS -N "pread_z10k" -s 10k -I 1000 -f /dev/zero
pread $OPTS -N "pread_z100k" -s 100k -I 2000 -f /dev/zero
Is there any real world use-case that would benefit from this
optimisation? Reading /dev/zero in a loop hardly counts as a practical
workload.