Re: [tip:perfcounters/core] perf_counter: x86: Fix call-chain support to use NMI-safe methods

Ingo Molnar
2009-06-16T08:43:26Z

* Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca> wrote:

> In the category "crazy ideas one should never express out loud", I
> could add the following. We could choose to save/restore the cr2
> register on the local stack at every interrupt entry/exit, and
> therefore allow the page fault handler to execute with interrupts
> enabled.
>
> I have not benchmarked the interrupt disabling overhead of the
> page fault handler handled by starting an interrupt-gated handler
> rather than trap-gated handler, but cli/sti instructions are known
> to take quite a few cycles on some architectures. e.g. 131 cycles
> for the pair on P4, 23 cycles on AMD Athlon X2 64, 43 cycles on
> Intel Core2.
>
> I am tempted to think that taking, say, ~10 cycles on the
> interrupt path worths it if we save a few tens of cycles on the
> page fault handler fast path.
>
> But again, this calls for benchmarks.

One absolutely non-trivial complication with such a scheme would be
preemptability: if we enter #PF with irqs enabled then it's
immediately preemptible on CONFIG_PREEMPT=y. The scheduler would
switch away to another context and the cr2 value is lost before it
has been read out.

This means an additional collateral damage to context-switch cr2.
(which might still be worth it given that context-switches are a
less hot codepath than pagefaults - but an additional complicaton.)

The ideal solution would be for the CPU to atomically push the cr2
value to the #PF hardware stack, alongside the error code it already
pushes there.

Ingo