Re: 7.52 second kernel compile

Linus Torvalds
2002-03-19T02:10:55Z

On Mon, 18 Mar 2002, David S. Miller wrote:
>
> Or maybe the program is just flawed, and the interesting 1/8 pattern comes
> from something else altogether.
>
> I think the weird Athlon behavior has to do with the fact that
> you've made your little test program as much of a cache tester
> as a TLB tester :-)

Oh, I was assuming that malloc(BIG) would do a mmap() of MAP_ANONYMOUS,
which should make all the pages 100% shared, and thus basically zero cache
overhead on a physically indexed machine like an x86.

So it was designed to reall yonly stress the TLB, not the regular caches.

Although I have to admit that I didn't actually _test_ that hypothesis.

Linus