Re: [PATCH 1/4] tracing: move __DO_TRACE out of line

Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-04-18T06:54:18Z

* Jeremy Fitzhardinge (jeremy@goop.org) wrote:
> Ingo Molnar wrote:
>> I meant to suggest to Jeremy to measure the effect of this
>> out-of-lining, in terms of instruction count in the hotpath.
>>
>
> OK, here's a comparison for trace_sched_switch, comparing inline and out
> of line tracing functions, with CONFIG_PREEMPT enabled:
>
> The inline __DO_TRACE version of trace_sched_switch inserts 20
> instructions, assembling to 114 bytes of code in the hot path:
>

[...]

>
> __do_trace_sched_switch is a fair bit larger, mostly due to function
> preamble frame and reg save/restore, and some unfortunate and
> unnecessary register thrashing (why not keep rdi,rsi,rdx where they
> are?). But it isn't that much larger than the inline version: 34
> instructions, 118 bytes. This code will also be shared among all
> instances of the tracepoint (not in this case, because sched_switch is
> unique, but other tracepoints have multiple users).
>

[...]

> So, conclusion: putting the tracepoint code out of line significantly
> reduces the hot-path code size at each tracepoint (114 bytes down to 31
> in this case, 27% the size). This should reduce the overhead of having
> tracing configured but not enabled. The saving won't be as large for
> tracepoints with fewer arguments or without CONFIG_PREEMPT, but I chose
> this example because it is realistic and undeniably a hot path. And
> when doing pvops tracing, 80 new events with hundreds of callsites
> around the kernel, this is really going to add up.
>
> The tradeoff is that the actual tracing function is a little larger, but
> not dramatically so. I would expect some performance hit when the
> tracepoint is actually enabled. This may be mitigated increased icache
> hits when a tracepoint has multiple sites.
>
> (BTW, I realized that we don't need to pass &__tracepoint_FOO to
> __do_trace_FOO(), since its always going to be the same; this simplifies
> the calling convention at the callsite, and it also makes void
> tracepoints work again.)
>
> J

Yep, keeping "void" working is a niceness I would like to keep. So about
this supposed "near-zero function call impact", I decided to take LTTng
for a little test. I compare tracing the "core set" of Google
tracepoints with the tracepoints inline and out-of line. Here is the
result :

tbench test

kernel : 2.6.30-rc1

running on a 8-cores x86_64, localhost server

tracepoints inactive :

2051.20 MB/sec

"google" tracepoints activated, flight recorder mode (overwrite) tracing

inline tracepoints

1704.70 MB/sec (16.9 % slower than baseline)

out-of-line tracepoints

1635.14 MB/sec (20.3 % slower than baseline)

So the overall tracer impact is 20 % bigger just by making the
tracepoints out-of-line. This is going to add up quickly if we add as
much function calls as we currently find in the event tracer fast path,
but LTTng, OTOH, has been designed to minimize the number of such
function calls, and you see a good example of why it's been such an
important design goal above.

About cache-line usage, I agree that in some cases gcc does not seem
intelligent enough to move those code paths away from the fast path.
What we would really whant there is -freorder-blocks-and-partition, but
I doubt we want this for the whole kernel, as it makes some jumps
slightly larger. One thing we should maybe look into is to add some kind
of "very unlikely" builtin expect to gcc that would teach it to really
put the branch in a cache-cold location, no matter what.

Mathieu

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
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