Re: 20% performance drop on PostgreSQL 9.2 from kernel 3.5.3 to 3.6-rc5 on AMD chipsets - bisected

Peter Zijlstra
2012-09-25T11:58:26Z

On Mon, 2012-09-24 at 19:11 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> In the not-so-distant past, we had the intel "Dunnington" Xeon, which
> was iirc basically three Core 2 duo's bolted together (ie three
> clusters of two cores sharing L2, and a fully shared L3). So that was
> a true multi-core with fairly big shared L2, and it really would be
> sad to not use the second core aggressively.

Ah indeed. My Core2Quad didn't have an L3 afaik (its sitting around
without a PSU atm so checking gets a little hard) so the LLC level was
the L2 and all worked out right (it also not having SMT helped of
course).

But if there was a Xeon chip that did add a package L3 then yes, all
this would become more interesting still. We'd need to extend the
scheduler topology a bit as well, I don't think it can currently handle
this well.

So I guess we get to do some work for steamroller.