Re: [PATCH] x86: Use asm-goto to implement mutex fast path on x86-64

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 04:56:30PM -0700, Wedson Almeida Filho wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 7:09 AM, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de> wrote:
> > 
> > > Btw, do we have any perf data showing any improvements from this patch?
> > 
> > I wrote a simple test the measures the time it takes to acquire and
> > release  an uncontended mutex (i.e., we always take the fast path)
> > 100k times. I ran it a few times, the original code averages
> > 2.743436ms, and the new code averages 2.101098ms, so it's about 23% improvement.
> 
> Microbenchmark results tend to be misleading in such situations. Rather, 
> it would be much closer to reality if you traced a real workload like a 
> simple kernel build, for example, with and without your patch.

Not sure - the main thing we want to know is whether it gets faster. The 
_amount_ will depend on things like precise usage patterns, caching, etc. 
- but rarely does a real workload turn a win like this into a loss.

> I.e., something like
> 
> perf stat --repeat 5 ./build-kernel.sh
> 
> and take a look at what the perfcouters are saying in both cases.

Hm, the noise of such a workload will very likely drown out improvements 
that are in the cycle scale.

Thanks,

	Ingo