Skip to content
Commit 10af6235 authored by Andy Lutomirski's avatar Andy Lutomirski Committed by Ingo Molnar
Browse files

x86/mm: Implement PCID based optimization: try to preserve old TLB entries using PCID



PCID is a "process context ID" -- it's what other architectures call
an address space ID.  Every non-global TLB entry is tagged with a
PCID, only TLB entries that match the currently selected PCID are
used, and we can switch PGDs without flushing the TLB.  x86's
PCID is 12 bits.

This is an unorthodox approach to using PCID.  x86's PCID is far too
short to uniquely identify a process, and we can't even really
uniquely identify a running process because there are monster
systems with over 4096 CPUs.  To make matters worse, past attempts
to use all 12 PCID bits have resulted in slowdowns instead of
speedups.

This patch uses PCID differently.  We use a PCID to identify a
recently-used mm on a per-cpu basis.  An mm has no fixed PCID
binding at all; instead, we give it a fresh PCID each time it's
loaded except in cases where we want to preserve the TLB, in which
case we reuse a recent value.

Here are some benchmark results, done on a Skylake laptop at 2.3 GHz
(turbo off, intel_pstate requesting max performance) under KVM with
the guest using idle=poll (to avoid artifacts when bouncing between
CPUs).  I haven't done any real statistics here -- I just ran them
in a loop and picked the fastest results that didn't look like
outliers.  Unpatched means commit a4eb8b99, so all the
bookkeeping overhead is gone.

ping-pong between two mms on the same CPU using eventfd:

  patched:         1.22µs
  patched, nopcid: 1.33µs
  unpatched:       1.34µs

Same ping-pong, but now touch 512 pages (all zero-page to minimize
cache misses) each iteration.  dTLB misses are measured by
dtlb_load_misses.miss_causes_a_walk:

  patched:         1.8µs  11M  dTLB misses
  patched, nopcid: 6.2µs, 207M dTLB misses
  unpatched:       6.1µs, 190M dTLB misses

Signed-off-by: default avatarAndy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: default avatarNadav Amit <nadav.amit@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@intel.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/9ee75f17a81770feed616358e6860d98a2a5b1e7.1500957502.git.luto@kernel.org


Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
parent 77ef56e4
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
0% Loading or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment