[PATCH v2 00/21] arm64: KVM: world switch in C

[christoffer.dall@linaro.org (Christoffer Dall)]

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