Re: [tip:perfcounters/core] perf_counter: x86: Fix call-chain support to use NMI-safe methods

Mathieu Desnoyers
2009-06-15T18:43:21Z

* Ingo Molnar (mingo@elte.hu) wrote:
>
> * Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
>
> > The GUP based method is pretty generic though - and can be used on
> > other architectures as well. It's not as fast as direct access
> > though.
>
> Another question is: your patch switches over all normal exceptions
> from IRET to hand-unroll+RET.
>

Nope, it actually only switches the exceptions returning from an
exception handler nested in NMI context to the hand-unroll+RET version.
Given such exception nesting is expected to be very rare, it should not
show any performance difference.

I also organised the code to make sure I did not add any test to the
fast paths in my original patch.

> It would be really nice to benchmark it (via 'perf stat' for example
> ;-) whether that's a slowdown or a speedup.
>
> If it's a slowdown then the decision is easy: we dont want this, we
> want to push the overhead into the sampling code, away from common
> codepaths.
>

I did not try to make the "hand unroll + ret" the default. I therefore
don't know if it is faster or slower than iret. But I prefered to stay
on the safe side and only modify the exceptions nested within NMI
handlers.

Mathieu

> [ If on the other hand it's a speedup of a few cycles then we have
> the problem of me suddenly liking this patch a whole lot more ;-) ]
>
> Ingo

--
Mathieu Desnoyers
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