Re: [patch 04/17] Add pagetable accessors to pack and unpack pagetable entries

Jeremy Fitzhardinge
2007-04-04T15:43:58Z

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> the main metric we are interested in is the overhead for people who just
> want to run the non-patched native kernel that has CONFIG_PARAVIRT
> enabled (99%+ of the users at the moment), so the delta is:
>
> null: +12.0%
> null IO: +7.5%
> stat: within noise
> open/close: within noise
> TCP: ~5.0%
> signal install: 2.0%
> signal handle: 4.7%
> fork: 2.7%
> exec: 3.6%
> shell: 3.6%
>
Hm, I don't think you can get this much precision out of these numbers.
I noticed larger variations from boot-to-boot running the same test.

> this is not 'barely measurable' but 'BLOODY LARGE' overhead.

Yes. Fortunately there's a noticable difference between native and
unpatched paravirt, because it shows all the effort we put into patching
is worthwhile.

>> paravirt, patching
>> ezr Linux 2.6.21- 1000 0.25 0.53 31.8 34.4 10.1 1.04 5.44 730. 1583 4600
>> ezr Linux 2.6.21- 1000 0.26 0.55 32.1 35.2 13.3 1.03 5.48 748. 1589 4606
>> ezr Linux 2.6.21- 1000 0.26 0.54 32.0 34.9 14.1 1.04 5.43 752. 1606 4647
>>
>
> i guess this pretty much makes the case for patching ...
>

Right, that's why there's patching.

J