x86-64: Remove unnecessary barrier in vread_tsc

RDTSC is completely unordered on modern Intel and AMD CPUs.  The
Intel manual says that lfence;rdtsc causes all previous instructions
to complete before the tsc is read, and the AMD manual says to use
mfence;rdtsc to do the same thing.

From a decent amount of testing [1] this is enough to make rdtsc
be ordered with respect to subsequent loads across a wide variety
of CPUs.

On Sandy Bridge (i7-2600), this improves a loop of
clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) by more than 5 ns/iter.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/4/18/350

Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@mit.edu>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: "David S. Miller" <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@amd64.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/%3C1c158b9d74338aa5361f96dd473d0e6a58235302.1306156808.git.luto%40mit.edu%3E
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/tsc.c b/arch/x86/kernel/tsc.c
index db697b81b8b1..1e6244202612 100644
--- a/arch/x86/kernel/tsc.c
+++ b/arch/x86/kernel/tsc.c
@@ -769,13 +769,14 @@ static cycle_t __vsyscall_fn vread_tsc(void)
         cycle_t ret;
 
         /*
-         * Surround the RDTSC by barriers, to make sure it's not
-         * speculated to outside the seqlock critical section and
-         * does not cause time warps:
+         * Empirically, a fence (of type that depends on the CPU)
+         * before rdtsc is enough to ensure that rdtsc is ordered
+         * with respect to loads.  The various CPU manuals are unclear
+         * as to whether rdtsc can be reordered with later loads,
+         * but no one has ever seen it happen.
          */
         rdtsc_barrier();
         ret = (cycle_t)vget_cycles();
-        rdtsc_barrier();
 
         return ret >= VVAR(vsyscall_gtod_data).clock.cycle_last ?
                 ret : VVAR(vsyscall_gtod_data).clock.cycle_last;