On 3/30/2010 10:15 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
-- my comments snipped --
This sounds like a good idea. Right now for the Wire-Speed processor, we have a
loop that goes through all of the nest PMU's and calls their respective per-pmu
functions.
Yes, I think it makes a lot of sense, so that there's not some sort of fixed
association of pmu contexts to cpu contexts, for example.
Definitely. I don't think it makes sense to have per-task context on
nest/uncore PMUs. At least we haven't found any justification for it.
This is necessary I think, because of the access time for some of the PMU's. I
wonder though if it should, perhaps optionally, be off-loaded to a high-priority
task to do the switching so that access latency to the PMU can be controlled.
As I mentioned when we met, some of the Wire-Speed processor nest PMU control
registers are accessed via SCOM, which is an internal, 200 MHz serial bus. We
are being quoted ~525 SCOM bus ticks to do a PMU control register access, which
comes out to about 2.5 microseconds. If you figure 5 accesses to rotate the
events on a PMU, that's a minimum of 12.5 microseconds.
Well, it's not as if this is a trivial task either :)
- Corey
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