[PATCH v2 00/21] arm64: KVM: world switch in C
Mario Smarduch
m.smarduch at samsung.com
Mon Nov 30 19:19:47 PST 2015
On 11/30/2015 12:33 PM, Christoffer Dall wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 27, 2015 at 06:49:54PM +0000, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>> Once upon a time, the KVM/arm64 world switch was a nice, clean, lean
>> and mean piece of hand-crafted assembly code. Over time, features have
>> crept in, the code has become harder to maintain, and the smallest
>> change is a pain to introduce. The VHE patches are a prime example of
>> why this doesn't work anymore.
>>
>> This series rewrites most of the existing assembly code in C, but keeps
>> the existing code structure in place (most function names will look
>> familiar to the reader). The biggest change is that we don't have to
>> deal with a static register allocation (the compiler does it for us),
>> we can easily follow structure and pointers, and only the lowest level
>> is still in assembly code. Oh, and a negative diffstat.
>>
>> There is still a healthy dose of inline assembly (system register
>> accessors, runtime code patching), but I've tried not to make it too
>> invasive. The generated code, while not exactly brilliant, doesn't
>> look too shaby. I do expect a small performance degradation, but I
>> believe this is something we can improve over time (my initial
>> measurements don't show any obvious regression though).
>
> I ran this through my experimental setup on m400 and got this:
>
> BM v4.4-rc2 v4.4-rc2-wsinc overhead
> -- -------- -------------- --------
> Apache 5297.11 5243.77 101.02%
> fio rand read 4354.33 4294.50 101.39%
> fio rand write 2465.33 2231.33 110.49%
> hackbench 17.48 19.78 113.16%
> memcached 96442.69 101274.04 95.23%
> TCP_MAERTS 5966.89 6029.72 98.96%
> TCP_STREAM 6284.60 6351.74 98.94%
> TCP_RR 15044.71 14324.03 105.03%
> pbzip2 c 18.13 17.89 98.68%
> pbzip2 d 11.42 11.45 100.26%
> kernbench 50.13 50.28 100.30%
> mysql 1 152.84 154.01 100.77%
> mysql 2 98.12 98.94 100.84%
> mysql 4 51.32 51.17 99.71%
> mysql 8 27.31 27.70 101.42%
> mysql 20 16.80 17.21 102.47%
> mysql 100 13.71 14.11 102.92%
> mysql 200 15.20 15.20 100.00%
> mysql 400 17.16 17.16 100.00%
>
> (you want to see this with a viewer that renders clear-text and tabs
> properly)
>
> What this tells me is that we do take a noticable hit on the
> world-switch path, which shows up in the TCP_RR and hackbench workloads,
> which have a high precision in their output.
>
> Note that the memcached number is well within its variability between
> individual benchmark runs, where it varies to 12% of its average in over
> 80% of the executions.
>
> I don't think this is a showstopper thought, but we could consider
> looking more closely at a breakdown of the world-switch path and verify
> if/where we are really taking a hit.
>
> -Christoffer
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>
I ran some of the lmbench 'micro benchmarks' - currently
the usleep one consistently stands out by about .4% or extra 300ns
per sleep. Few other ones have some outliers, I will look at these
closer. Tests were ran on Juno.
- Mario
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