Re: [Qemu-devel] How to measure guest memory access (qemu_ld/qemu_st) time?

["Lluís Vilanova" <vilanova@ac.upc.edu>]

Laurent Desnogues writes:

> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 12:30 AM, Lluís Vilanova <vilanova@ac.upc.edu> wrote:
> [...]
>> Now that I think of it, you will have problems generating code to surround each
>> qemu_ld/st with a lightweight mechanism to get the time. In x86 it would be
>> rdtsc, but you want to generate a host rdtsc instruction inside the code
>> generated by QEMU's TCG, so you should also have to hack TCG (or the code
>> generation pointers) to issue an rdtsc instruction.

> Even rdtsc would introduce enough noise that it wouldn't be reliable
> for such a micro measurement:  as far as I understand it, this instruction
> can be reordered, so you need to flush the pipeline before issuing it.

> Intel has a document about that:
> download.intel.com/embedded/software/IA/324264.pdf
> The overhead of their proposed method is so high that it's likely it
> would take longer than the execution of the fast path itself.

> IMHO a mix of YeongKyoon Lee way to count ld/st and comparison
> between user mode and softmmu still seems to be the best approach
> (well unless you have access to a cycle accurate simulator :-).

Ah, true; I forgot about the architectural implications. Sometimes you just
assume the nice in-order world :)


Lluis

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