aboutsummaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/net/packet
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorAnton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>2010-08-10 21:40:27 -0400
committerBenjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>2010-09-02 00:07:30 -0400
commitf89451fbd2b9f28f5ff156154989599ec062354b (patch)
tree1722b247079fb80f972449066c9f5c67a5564d4c /net/packet
parent8c77391475bc3284a380fc46aaf0bcf26bde3ae6 (diff)
powerpc: Feature nop out reservation clear when stcx checks address
The POWER architecture does not require stcx to check that it is operating on the same address as the larx. This means it is possible for an an exception handler to execute a larx, get a reservation, decide not to do the stcx and then return back with an active reservation. If the interrupted code was in the middle of a larx/stcx sequence the stcx could incorrectly succeed. All recent POWER CPUs check the address before letting the stcx succeed so we can create a CPU feature and nop it out. As Ben suggested, we can only do this in our syscall path because there is a remote possibility some kernel code gets interrupted by an exception that ends up operating on the same cacheline. Thanks to Paul Mackerras and Derek Williams for the idea. To test this I used a very simple null syscall (actually getppid) testcase at http://ozlabs.org/~anton/junkcode/null_syscall.c I tested against 2.6.35-git10 with the following changes against the pseries_defconfig: CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING=n CONFIG_AUDIT=n CONFIG_PPC_4K_PAGES=n CONFIG_PPC_64K_PAGES=y CONFIG_FORCE_MAX_ZONEORDER=9 CONFIG_PPC_SUBPAGE_PROT=n CONFIG_FUNCTION_TRACER=n CONFIG_FUNCTION_GRAPH_TRACER=n CONFIG_IRQSOFF_TRACER=n CONFIG_STACK_TRACER=n to remove the overhead of virtual CPU accounting, syscall auditing and the ftrace mcount tracers. 64kB pages were enabled to minimise TLB misses. POWER6: +8.2% POWER7: +7.0% Another suggestion was to use a larx to something in the L1 instead of a stcx. This was almost as fast as removing the larx on POWER6, but only 3.5% faster on POWER7. We can use this to speed up the reservation clear in our exception exit code. Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org> Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'net/packet')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions