From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1753897AbbFRIBN (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Jun 2015 04:01:13 -0400 Received: from mail-wi0-f170.google.com ([209.85.212.170]:38731 "EHLO mail-wi0-f170.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752607AbbFRIBL (ORCPT ); Thu, 18 Jun 2015 04:01:11 -0400 Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 10:01:06 +0200 From: Ingo Molnar To: Andy Lutomirski Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" , Linus Torvalds , Denys Vlasenko , Borislav Petkov , X86 ML , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" Subject: Re: For your amusement: slightly faster syscalls Message-ID: <20150618080106.GA11473@gmail.com> References: <557F46CF.8040003@zytor.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org * Andy Lutomirski wrote: > On Mon, Jun 15, 2015 at 2:42 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > On 06/15/2015 02:30 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote: > >> > >> On Jun 12, 2015 2:09 PM, "Andy Lutomirski" >> > wrote: > >>> > >>> Caveat emptor: it also disables SMP. > >> > >> OK, I don't think it's interesting in that form. > >> > >> For small cpu counts, I guess we could have per-cpu syscall entry points > >> (unless the syscall entry msr is shared across hyperthreading? Some msr's are > >> per thread, others per core, AFAIK), and it could actually work that way. > >> > >> But I'm not sure the three cycles is worth the worry and the complexity. > > > > We discussed the per-cpu syscall entry point, and the issue at hand is that it > > is very hard to do that without with fairly high probability touch another > > cache line and quite possibly another page (and hence a TLB entry.) ( So apparently I wasn't Cc:ed, or gmail ate the mail - so I can only guess from the surrounding discussion what this patch does, as my lkml folder is still doing a long refresh ... ) > > I think this isn't actually true. If we were going to do a per-cpu syscall > entry point, then we might as well duplicate all of the entry code per cpu > instead of just a short trampoline. That would avoid extra TLB misses and (L1) > cache misses, I think. > > I still think this is far too complicated for three cycles. I was hoping for > more. The other problem with duplicating entry code is that with per CPU entry code we split its cache footprint in higher level caches (such as the L2 but also L3 cache). The interesting number would be to check cache cold entry performance, not cache hot one: the NUMA latency advantage of having per node copies of the entry code might be worth it. ... and that's why UP is the least interesting case ;-) Thanks, Ingo