Re: Exit timing - results online

[Hollis Blanchard <hollisb@us.ibm.com>]

On Thu, 2008-11-06 at 12:25 +0100, Christian Ehrhardt wrote:
> Hi,
> I just added the following page to our wiki based online documentation 
> to show some numbers on kvmppc as of today.
> You can find that page at thew wiki entry:
>   PowerPC_Exittimings 
> <http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/PowerPC_Exittimings> - an overview of 
> workload dependent overhead on non hardware assisted powerpc virtualization
>   (http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/PowerPC_Exittimings)

Very interesting; thanks for putting these numbers together Christian.

I'm interested by the instruction emulation, which shows up as the
highest cost in every workload. That suggests that even small
improvements to the emulation path, such as using a better lookup than
nested switch statements, could have a significant effect on throughput.

It's also interesting that the average is really close to the minimum,
but the standard deviation is huge. That suggests that the vast majority
of exits take the minimum amount of time, but a few exits take a *ton*
of time. Looking through the set of instructions we emulate on 440, it
looks like the only even slightly sophisticated ones are rfi, tlbwe, and
tlbsx...

-- 
Hollis Blanchard
IBM Linux Technology Center