Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@...>, <akpm@...>, Robin Holt <holt@...>, Avi Kivity <avi@...>, Izik Eidus <izike@...>, <kvm-devel@...>, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...>, <general@...>, Steve Wise <swise@...>, Roland Dreier <rdreier@...>, Kanoj Sarcar <kanojsarcar@...>, <linux-kernel@...>, <linux-mm@...>, <daniel.blueman@...>, Christoph Lameter <clameter@...>
On Wed, Feb 20, 2008 at 11:39:42AM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
I ported the GRU driver to use the latest #v6 patch and ran a series of
tests on it using our system simulator. The simulator is slow so true
stress or swapping is not possible - at least within a finite amount of
time.
Functionally, the #v6 patch seems to work for the GRU. However, I did
notice two significant differences that make the #v6 performance worse for
the GRU than Christoph's patch. I think one difference is easily fixable
but the other is more difficult:
- the location of the mmu_notifier_release() callout is at a
different place in the 2 patches. Christoph has the callout
BEFORE the call to unmap_vmas() whereas you have it AFTER. The
net result is that the GRU does a LOT of 1-page TLB flushes
during process teardown. These flushes are not done with
Christops's patch.
- the range callouts in Christoph's patch benefit the GRU because
multiple TLB entries can be flushed with a single GRU
instruction (the GRU hardware supports a range flush using a
vaddr & length). The #v6 patch does a TLB flush for each page in
the range. Flushing on the GRU is slow so being able to flush
multiple pages with a single request is a benefit.
Seems like the latter difference could be significant for other users
of mmu notifiers.
--- jack
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