Dick Fowles, Don Zickus and Joe Mario have been working on
improvements to perf, and noticed heavy cache line contention
on the mm_cpumask, running linpack on a 60 core / 120 thread
system.
The cause turned out to be unnecessary atomic accesses to the
mm_cpumask. When in lazy TLB mode, the CPU is only removed from
the mm_cpumask if there is a TLB flush event.
Most of the time, no such TLB flush happens, and the kernel
skips the TLB reload. It can also skip the atomic memory
set & test.
Here is a summary of Joe's test results:
* The __schedule function dropped from 24% of all program cycles down
to 5.5%.
* The cacheline contention/hotness for accesses to that bitmask went
from being the 1st/2nd hottest - down to the 84th hottest (0.3% of
all shared misses which is now quite cold)
* The average load latency for the bit-test-n-set instruction in
__schedule dropped from 10k-15k cycles down to an average of 600 cycles.
* The linpack program results improved from 133 GFlops to 144 GFlops.
Peak GFlops rose from 133 to 153.
Reported-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Reported-by: Joe Mario <jmario@redhat.com>
Tested-by: Joe Mario <jmario@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
Acked-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20130731221421.616d3d20@annuminas.surriel.com
[ Made the comments consistent around the modified code. ]
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
8f898fbbe5