In Linux 3.18 and below, GCC hoists the lsl instructions in the
pvclock code all the way to the beginning of __vdso_clock_gettime,
slowing the non-paravirt case significantly. For unknown reasons,
presumably related to the removal of a branch, the performance issue
is gone as of
e76b027e64 x86,vdso: Use LSL unconditionally for vgetcpu
but I don't trust GCC enough to expect the problem to stay fixed.
There should be no correctness issue, because the __getcpu calls in
__vdso_vlock_gettime were never necessary in the first place.
Note to stable maintainers: In 3.18 and below, depending on
configuration, gcc 4.9.2 generates code like this:
9c3: 44 0f 03 e8 lsl %ax,%r13d
9c7: 45 89 eb mov %r13d,%r11d
9ca: 0f 03 d8 lsl %ax,%ebx
This patch won't apply as is to any released kernel, but I'll send a
trivial backported version if needed.
Fixes: 51c19b4f59 x86: vdso: pvclock gettime support
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 3.8+
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
1ddf0b1b11