Re: [PATCH] x86_64, asm: Work around AMD SYSRET SS descriptor attribute issue

Borislav Petkov
2015-04-28T18:38:45Z

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 10:16:33AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> I suspect it might be related to things like getting performance
> counters and instruction debug traps etc right. There are quite
> possibly also simply constraints where the front end has to generate
> *something* just to keep the back end happy.
>
> The front end can generally not just totally remove things without any
> tracking, since the front end doesn't know if things are speculative
> etc. So you can't do instruction debug traps in the front end afaik.
> Or rather, I'm sure you *could*, but in general I suspect the best way
> to handle nops without making them *too* special is to bunch up
> several to make them look like one big instruction, and then associate
> that bunch with some minimal tracking uop that uses minimal resources
> in the back end without losing sight of the original nop entirely, so
> that you can still do checks at retirement time.

Yeah, I was thinking about a simplified uop for tracking - makes most
sense ...

> So I think the "you can do ~5 nops per cycle" is not unreasonable.
> Even in the uop cache, the nops have to take some space, and have to
> do things like update eip, so I don't think they'll ever be entirely
> free, the best you can do is minimize their impact.

... exactly! So something needs to increment rIP so you either need to
special-handle that and remember by how many bytes to increment and
exactly *when* at retire time or simply use a barebones, simplified uop
which does that for you for free and flows down the pipe. Yeah, that
makes a lot of sense!

> Yeah. That looks somewhat reasonable. I think the 16h architecture
> technically decodes just two instructions per cycle,

Yeah, fetch 32B and look at two 16B for max 2 insns per cycle. I.e.,
two-way.

> but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some simple nop special casing
> going on so that it can decode three nops in one go when things line
> up right.

Right.

> So you might get 0.33 cycles for the best case, but then 0.5 cycles
> when it crosses a 16-byte boundary or something. So you might have
> some pattern where it decodes 32 bytes worth of nops as 12/8/12 bytes
> (3/2/3 instructions), which would come out to 0.38 cycles. Add some
> random overhead for the loop, and I could see the 0.39 cycles.
>
> That was wild handwaving with no data to back it up, but I'm trying
> to explain to myself why you could get some odd number like that. It
> seems _possiible_ at least.

Yep, that makes sense.

Now if only we had some numbers to back this up with... I'll play with
this more.

--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.

ECO tip #101: Trim your mails when you reply.
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