Xiaohui Xin and some other folks at Intel have been looking into what's
behind the performance hit of paravirt_ops when running native.
It appears that the hit is entirely due to the paravirtualized
spinlocks introduced by:
| commit 8efcbab674
| Date: Mon Jul 7 12:07:51 2008 -0700
|
| paravirt: introduce a "lock-byte" spinlock implementation
The extra call/return in the spinlock path is somehow
causing an increase in the cycles/instruction of somewhere around 2-7%
(seems to vary quite a lot from test to test). The working theory is
that the CPU's pipeline is getting upset about the
call->call->locked-op->return->return, and seems to be failing to
speculate (though I haven't seen anything definitive about the precise
reasons). This doesn't entirely make sense, because the performance
hit is also visible on unlock and other operations which don't involve
locked instructions. But spinlock operations clearly swamp all the
other pvops operations, even though I can't imagine that they're
nearly as common (there's only a .05% increase in instructions
executed).
If I disable just the pv-spinlock calls, my tests show that pvops is
identical to non-pvops performance on native (my measurements show that
it is actually about .1% faster, but Xiaohui shows a .05% slowdown).
Summary of results, averaging 10 runs of the "mmperf" test, using a
no-pvops build as baseline:
nopv Pv-nospin Pv-spin
CPU cycles 100.00% 99.89% 102.18%
instructions 100.00% 100.10% 100.15%
CPI 100.00% 99.79% 102.03%
cache ref 100.00% 100.84% 100.28%
cache miss 100.00% 90.47% 88.56%
cache miss rate 100.00% 89.72% 88.31%
branches 100.00% 99.93% 100.04%
branch miss 100.00% 103.66% 107.72%
branch miss rt 100.00% 103.73% 107.67%
wallclock 100.00% 99.90% 102.20%
The clear effect here is that the 2% increase in CPI is
directly reflected in the final wallclock time.
(The other interesting effect is that the more ops are
out of line calls via pvops, the lower the cache access
and miss rates. Not too surprising, but it suggests that
the non-pvops kernel is over-inlined. On the flipside,
the branch misses go up correspondingly...)
So, what's the fix?
Paravirt patching turns all the pvops calls into direct calls, so
_spin_lock etc do end up having direct calls. For example, the compiler
generated code for paravirtualized _spin_lock is:
<_spin_lock+0>: mov %gs:0xb4c8,%rax
<_spin_lock+9>: incl 0xffffffffffffe044(%rax)
<_spin_lock+15>: callq *0xffffffff805a5b30
<_spin_lock+22>: retq
The indirect call will get patched to:
<_spin_lock+0>: mov %gs:0xb4c8,%rax
<_spin_lock+9>: incl 0xffffffffffffe044(%rax)
<_spin_lock+15>: callq <__ticket_spin_lock>
<_spin_lock+20>: nop; nop /* or whatever 2-byte nop */
<_spin_lock+22>: retq
One possibility is to inline _spin_lock, etc, when building an
optimised kernel (ie, when there's no spinlock/preempt
instrumentation/debugging enabled). That will remove the outer
call/return pair, returning the instruction stream to a single
call/return, which will presumably execute the same as the non-pvops
case. The downsides arel 1) it will replicate the
preempt_disable/enable code at eack lock/unlock callsite; this code is
fairly small, but not nothing; and 2) the spinlock definitions are
already a very heavily tangled mass of #ifdefs and other preprocessor
magic, and making any changes will be non-trivial.
The other obvious answer is to disable pv-spinlocks. Making them a
separate config option is fairly easy, and it would be trivial to
enable them only when Xen is enabled (as the only non-default user).
But it doesn't really address the common case of a distro build which
is going to have Xen support enabled, and leaves the open question of
whether the native performance cost of pv-spinlocks is worth the
performance improvement on a loaded Xen system (10% saving of overall
system CPU when guests block rather than spin). Still it is a
reasonable short-term workaround.
[ Impact: fix pvops performance regression when running native ]
Analysed-by: "Xin Xiaohui" <xiaohui.xin@intel.com>
Analysed-by: "Li Xin" <xin.li@intel.com>
Analysed-by: "Nakajima Jun" <jun.nakajima@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Cc: Xen-devel <xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
LKML-Reference: <4A0B62F7.5030802@goop.org>
[ fixed the help text ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Now that x86-64 has directly accessible percpu variables, it can also
implement the direct versions of these operations, which operate on a
vcpu_info structure directly embedded in the percpu area.
In fact, the 64-bit versions are more or less identical, and so can be
shared. The only two differences are:
1. xen_restore_fl_direct takes its argument in eax on 32-bit, and rdi on 64-bit.
Unfortunately it isn't possible to directly refer to the 2nd lsb of rdi directly
(as you can with %ah), so the code isn't quite as dense.
2. check_events needs to variants to save different registers.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@linux.intel.com>
Due to confusion between the ftrace infrastructure and the gcc profiling
tracer "ftrace", this patch renames the config options from FTRACE to
FUNCTION_TRACER. The other two names that are offspring from FTRACE
DYNAMIC_FTRACE and FTRACE_MCOUNT_RECORD will stay the same.
This patch was generated mostly by script, and partially by hand.
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Add support for exporting statistics on mmu updates, multicall
batching and pv spinlocks into debugfs. The base path is xen/ and
each subsystem adds its own directory: mmu, multicalls, spinlocks.
In each directory, writing 1 to "zero_stats" will cause the
corresponding stats to be zeroed the next time they're updated.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Acked-by: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@novell.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
For some reason I managed to miss a bunch of irq-related functions
which also need to be compiled without -pg when using ftrace. This
patch moves them into their own file, and starts a cleanup process
I've been meaning to do anyway.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
Cc: "Alex Nixon (Intern)" <Alex.Nixon@eu.citrix.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
ftrace requires certain low-level code, like spinlocks and timestamps,
to be compiled without -pg in order to avoid infinite recursion. This
patch splits out the core paravirt spinlocks and the Xen spinlocks
into separate files which can be compiled without -pg.
Also do xen/time.c while we're about it. As a result, we can now use
ftrace within a Xen domain.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Split xen-asm into 32- and 64-bit files, and implement the 64-bit
variants.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Stephen Tweedie <sct@redhat.com>
Cc: Eduardo Habkost <ehabkost@redhat.com>
Cc: Mark McLoughlin <markmc@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
This patch implements Xen save/restore and migration.
Saving is triggered via xenbus, which is polled in
drivers/xen/manage.c. When a suspend request comes in, the kernel
prepares itself for saving by:
1 - Freeze all processes. This is primarily to prevent any
partially-completed pagetable updates from confusing the suspend
process. If CONFIG_PREEMPT isn't defined, then this isn't necessary.
2 - Suspend xenbus and other devices
3 - Stop_machine, to make sure all the other vcpus are quiescent. The
Xen tools require the domain to run its save off vcpu0.
4 - Within the stop_machine state, it pins any unpinned pgds (under
construction or destruction), performs canonicalizes various other
pieces of state (mostly converting mfns to pfns), and finally
5 - Suspend the domain
Restore reverses the steps used to save the domain, ending when all
the frozen processes are thawed.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
move arch/x86/xen/manage.c under drivers/xen/to share codes
with x86 and ia64.
ia64/xen also uses manage.c
Signed-off-by: Isaku Yamahata <yamahata@valinux.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
split out x86 specific part from grant-table.c and
allow ia64/xen specific initialization.
ia64/xen grant table is based on pseudo physical address
(guest physical address) unlike x86/xen. On ia64 init_mm
doesn't map identity straight mapped area.
ia64/xen specific grant table initialization is necessary.
Signed-off-by: Isaku Yamahata <yamahata@valinux.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
move arch/x86/xen/events.c undedr drivers/xen to share codes
with x86 and ia64. And minor adjustment to compile.
ia64/xen also uses events.c
Signed-off-by: Yaozu (Eddie) Dong <eddie.dong@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Isaku Yamahata <yamahata@valinux.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
ia64/xen also uses it too. Move it into common place so that
ia64/xen can share the code.
Signed-off-by: Isaku Yamahata <yamahata@valinux.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
