On Tue, 13 Feb 2018, Dan Williams wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 2:00 PM, Mikulas Patocka <mpato...@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Fri, 8 Dec 2017, Dan Williams wrote:
> >
> >> > > > when we write to
> >> > > > persistent memory using cached write instructions and use dax_flush
> >> > > > afterwards to flush cache for the affected range, the performance is 
> >> > > > about
> >> > > > 350MB/s. It is practically unusable - worse than low-end SSDs.
> >> > > >
> >> > > > On the other hand, the movnti instruction can sustain performance of 
> >> > > > one
> >> > > > 8-byte write per clock cycle. We don't have to flush cache 
> >> > > > afterwards, the
> >> > > > only thing that must be done is to flush the write-combining buffer 
> >> > > > with
> >> > > > the sfence instruction. Movnti has much better throughput than 
> >> > > > dax_flush.
> >> > >
> >> > > What about memcpy_flushcache?
> >> >
> >> > but
> >> >
> >> > - using memcpy_flushcache is overkill if we need just one or two 8-byte
> >> > writes to the metadata area. Why not use movnti directly?
> >> >
> >>
> >> The driver performs so many 8-byte moves that the cost of the
> >> memcpy_flushcache() function call significantly eats into your
> >> performance?
> >
> > I've measured it on Skylake i7-6700 - and the dm-writecache driver has 2%
> > lower throughput when it uses memcpy_flushcache() to update it metadata
> > instead of explicitly coded "movnti" instructions.
> >
> > I've created this patch - it doesn't change API in any way, but it
> > optimizes memcpy_flushcache for 4, 8 and 16-byte writes (that is what my
> > driver mostly uses). With this patch, I can remove the explicit "asm"
> > statements from my driver. Would you consider commiting this patch to the
> > kernel?
> >
> > Mikulas
> >
> >
> 
> Yes, this looks good to me. You can send it to the x86 folks with my:
> 
> Reviewed-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.willi...@intel.com>
> 
> ...or let me know and I can chase it through the -tip tree. Either way
> works for me.

If you have access to some tree that will be merged, you can commit the 
patch there.

Mikulas

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