Re: [RFC PATCH] powerpc/32: Switch VDSO to C implementation.

Thomas Gleixner
2019-10-26T15:53:52Z

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On Tue, 22 Oct 2019, Christophe Leroy wrote:
> Le 22/10/2019 à 11:01, Christophe Leroy a écrit :
> > Le 21/10/2019 à 23:29, Thomas Gleixner a écrit :
> > > On Mon, 21 Oct 2019, Christophe Leroy wrote:
> > >
> > > > This is a tentative to switch powerpc/32 vdso to generic C
> > > > implementation.
> > > > It will likely not work on 64 bits or even build properly at the moment.
> > > >
> > > > powerpc is a bit special for VDSO as well as system calls in the
> > > > way that it requires setting CR SO bit which cannot be done in C.
> > > > Therefore, entry/exit and fallback needs to be performed in ASM.
> > > >
> > > > To allow that, C fallbacks just return -1 and the ASM entry point
> > > > performs the system call when the C function returns -1.
> > > >
> > > > The performance is rather disappoiting. That's most likely all
> > > > calculation in the C implementation are based on 64 bits math and
> > > > converted to 32 bits at the very end. I guess C implementation should
> > > > use 32 bits math like the assembly VDSO does as of today.
> > >
> > > > gettimeofday:    vdso: 750 nsec/call
> > > >
> > > > gettimeofday:    vdso: 1533 nsec/call
> >
> > Small improvement (3%) with the proposed change:
> >
> > gettimeofday:    vdso: 1485 nsec/call
>
> By inlining do_hres() I get the following:
>
> gettimeofday: vdso: 1072 nsec/call

What's the effect for clock_gettime()?

gettimeofday() is suboptimal vs. the PPC ASM variant due to an extra
division, but clock_gettime() should be 1:1 comparable.

Thanks,

tglx