Corey,

I ran a few tests. It appears that on both X87 (Core 2) and Itanium 2
(Montvale) there is a 4% penalty on average PMU ctxsw cost by using
interrupt masking. That is a bit high. So instead, I have provided
macros for you to override just like what you did for
spin_lock_irqsave and
pfm_spin_unlock_irqrestore(). Try overriding them on PPC and let me
know if this works now. Just pull from GIT to get the patch.


On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 2:20 AM, Corey J Ashford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> Hi Stephane,
>
>  Thanks for the replies.
>
>  I didn't check with Paul, but I looked into the code in schedule() and it
> does call local_irq_disable(), which does use the soft interrupt disabling
> mechanism.
>
>  - Corey
>
>
>  Corey Ashford
>  Software Engineer
>  IBM Linux Technology Center, Linux Toolchain
>  Beaverton, OR
>  503-578-3507
>  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>  "stephane eranian" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 04/09/2008 03:46:56
> PM:
>
>
>
>  > Corey,
>  >
>  >
>  > On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Corey Ashford <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> wrote:
>  > > If schedule() uses lazy interrupt disabling, the problem we are seeing
> could
>  > > result, since the PMU interrupt does not use the lazy interrupt wrapper
> on
>  > > POWER.
>  > >
>  > Could you confirm this with Paul?
>  >
>  > >  Do you think that using the pfm irq versions of this code is too much
> of a
>  > > performance hit?
>  >
>  > You would be masking interrupts which are already masked. I don't know
>  > the cost for each arch.
>  >
>  >
>  > >
>  > >  I don't see any way for this to work right on POWER without this
> change,
>  > > short of changing the wrapper used for the PMU interrupt (which we've
>  > > already decided was a bad idea).  Of course we could ifdef this code
> for
>  > > POWER, I suppose.  Ick.
>  >
>  > No, I'd rather pay the (hopefully) small penalty but have more readable
> code.
>  >
>  > >
>  > >  In any case, the fix in perfmon_smpl.c needs to be fixed, right? The
> other
>  > > unlock in that function is a pfm_spin_unlock_irqrestore(...)
>  > >
>  >
>  > I don't think the change in perfmon_smpl.c is needed. There is a reason
> why
>  > the unlock is broken down in multiple steps. We need to have
>  > interrupts enabled
>  > for vfree() in pfm_context_free(). pfm_spin_unlock_irqrestore() does
>  > not guarantee
>  > that interrupts will be enabled, it simply restores them to the state
>  > they were before
>  > spin_lock_irqsave(). I have seen situations (I think on IA-64) where
>  > pfm_handle_work
>  > is not invoked with interrupts enabled. This part of the code is
>  > handling a very special
>  > case where the context is zombie, i.e., no more controlling
>  > (monitoring) process.
>  >
>  > As for perfmon_intr.c, the reason this is regular spin_lock is because
>  > interrupts are already
>  > masked up to the same priority level. The PMU interrupts should be set
>  > very high in the
>  > priority levels. On X86, all interrupts are automatically masked. I
>  > think that we could
>  > enforce all interrupts masked with irqsave() to guarantee across the
>  > board that we have
>  > the same level of intr. masking.
>  >
>  >
>  >
>  > >  - Corey
>  > >
>  > >
>  > >
>  > > >
>  > > > The reason regular spin_lock/spin_unlock are used is because the
>  > > > __pfm_ctxsw() routine is expected to
>  > > > be run with interrupts ALREADY masked by upper level code (likely
>  > > > schedule()).  It may be that on PPC,
>  > > > schedule does things differently at its tail (where switch_to()) is
>  > > invoked.
>  > > >
>  > > > You are trying adding a BUG_ON(!irqs_disabled()) and see if you catch
>  > > > something. If not then I wonder
>  > > > how this could be related to the lazy masking for which you had to
> add
>  > > > the special pfm_spin_lock_irq.....
>  > > >
>  > > >
>  > >
>  > >  --
>  > >
>  > >  Corey Ashford
>  > >  Software Engineer
>  > >  IBM Linux Technology Center, Linux Toolchain
>  > >  Beaverton, OR
>  > >  503-578-3507
>  > >  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>  > >
>  > >
>
>
>

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