Re: Intel P6 vs P7 system call performance

Pavel Machek
2002-12-19T22:07:05Z

Hi!

> I've created a modified glibc which uses the syscall code for almost
> everything. There are a few int $0x80 left here and there but mostly it
> is a centralized change.
>
> The result: all works as expected. Nice.
>
> On my test machine your little test program performs the syscalls on
> roughly twice as fast (HT P4, pretty new). Your numbers are perhaps for
> the P4 Xeons. Anyway, when measuring some more involved code (I ran my
> thread benchmark) I got only about 3% performance increase. It's doing
> a fair amount of system calls. But again, the good news is your code
> survived even this stress test.
>
>
> The problem with the current solution is the instruction set of the x86.
> In your test code you simply use call 0xfffff000 and it magically work.
> But this is only the case because your program is linked statically.
>
> For the libc DSO I had to play some dirty tricks. The x86 CPU has no
> absolute call. The variant with an immediate parameter is a relative
> jump. Only when jumping through a register or memory location is it
> possible to jump to an absolute address. To be clear, if I have
>
> call 0xfffff000
>
> in a DSO which is loaded at address 0x80000000 the jumps ends at
> 0x7fffffff. The problem is that the static linker doesn't know the load
> address. We could of course have the dynamic linker fix up the
> addresses but this is plain stupid. It would mean fixing up a lot of
> places and making of those pages covered non-sharable.

Can't you do call far __SOME_CS, 0xfffff000?

Pavel
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