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From: Michael Breuer <mbreuer@majjas.com>
To: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: x86 - cpu_relax - why nop vs. pause?
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 12:28:51 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4B6EF853.9090704@majjas.com> (raw)

I did search and noticed some old discussions. Looking at both Intel and 
AMD documentation, it would seem that PAUSE is the preferred instruction 
within a spin lock. Further, both Intel and AMD specifications state 
that the instruction is backward compatible with older x86 processors.

For fun, I changed nop to pause on my core i7 920 (smt enabled) and I'm 
seeing about a 5-10% performance improvement on 2.6.33 rc7. Perf top 
shows time spent in spin_lock under load drops from an average of around 
35% to about 25%.

Thoughts?

             reply	other threads:[~2010-02-07 17:28 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 7+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-02-07 17:28 Michael Breuer [this message]
2010-02-07 18:09 ` x86 - cpu_relax - why nop vs. pause? Joerg Roedel
2010-02-07 18:32 ` Arjan van de Ven
     [not found] ` <1265566470.6280.10.camel@marge.simson.net>
2010-02-07 20:08   ` Michael Breuer
2010-02-07 21:15     ` Michael Breuer
2010-02-08  3:50       ` Michael Breuer
2010-02-08 13:33         ` Artur Skawina

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