On 2021/4/14 18:41, Catalin Marinas wrote:
On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 05:25:43PM +0800, Kai Shen wrote:
Performance decreases happen in __arch_clear_user when this
function is not correctly aligned on HISI-HIP08 arm64 SOC which
fetches 32 bytes (8 instructions) from icache with a 32-bytes
aligned end address. As a result, if the hot loop is not 32-bytes
aligned, it may take more icache fetches which leads to decrease
in performance.
Dump of assembler code for function __arch_clear_user:
0x809e3f10 :nop
0x809e3f14 :mov x2, x1
0x809e3f18 :subs x1, x1, #0x8
0x809e3f1c :b.mi 0x809e3f30 <__arch_clear_user+3
- 0x809e3f20 :strxzr, [x0],#8
hot0x809e3f24 :nop
loop 0x809e3f28 :subs x1, x1, #0x8
- 0x809e3f2c :b.pl 0x809e3f20 <__arch_clear_user+1
The hot loop above takes one icache fetch as the code is in one
32-bytes aligned area and the loop takes one more icache fetch
when it is not aligned like below.
0x809e4178 : strxzr, [x0],#8
0x809e417c : nop
0x809e4180 : subs x1, x1, #0x8
0x809e4184 : b.pl 0x809e4178 <__arch_clear_user+
Data collected by perf:
aligned not aligned
instructions 57733790 57739065
L1-dcache-store 14938070 13718242
L1-dcache-store-misses 349280 349869
L1-icache-loads 15380895 28500665
As we can see, L1-icache-loads almost double when the loop is not
aligned.
This problem is found in linux 4.19 on HISI-HIP08 arm64 SOC.
Not sure what the case is on other arm64 SOC, but it should do
no harm.
Signed-off-by: Kai Shen
Do you have a real world workload that's affected by this function?
I'm against adding alignments and nops for specific hardware
implementations. What about lots of other loops that the compiler may
generate or that we wrote in asm?
>
The benchmark we used which suffer performance decrease:
https://github.com/redhat-performance/libMicro
pread $OPTS -N "pread_z1k"-s 1k-I 300 -f /dev/zero
pread $OPTS -N "pread_z10k"-s 10k-I 1000 -f /dev/zero
pread $OPTS -N "pread_z100k"-s 100k-I 2000 -f /dev/zero
As far as I know, GCC has option falign-loops to align loop, as for
code written in asm, maybe we should take care of them on our own.
From my point of view, the loop in __arch_clear_user is really hot
when being used, it is reasonable to align it.
Or maybe adding a errata CONFIG for HNS_HIP08 to fix this?
Previous message have some problems with formats of kernel mail list
So I resend this message.
