[PATCH 2/7] powerpc/mm: 64-bit 4k: use a PMD-based virtual page table

[Scott Wood]

On Thu, 19 May 2011 07:33:55 +1000
Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 16:05 -0500, Scott Wood wrote:
> > Loads with non-linear access patterns were producing a very high
> > ratio of recursive pt faults to regular tlb misses.  Rather than
> > choose between a 4-level table walk or a 1-level virtual page table
> > lookup, use a hybrid scheme with a virtual linear pmd, followed by a
> > 2-level lookup in the normal handler.
> > 
> > This adds about 5 cycles (assuming no cache misses, and e5500 timing)
> > to a normal TLB miss, but greatly reduces the recursive fault rate
> > for loads which don't have locality within 2 MiB regions but do have
> > significant locality within 1 GiB regions.  Improvements of close to 50%
> > were seen on such benchmarks.
> 
> Can you publish benchmarks that compare these two with no virtual at all
> (4 full loads) ?

I see a 2% cost going from virtual pmd to full 4-level walk in the
benchmark mentioned above (some type of sort), and just under 3% in
page-stride lat_mem_rd from lmbench.

OTOH, the virtual pmd approach still leaves the possibility of taking a
bunch of virtual page table misses if non-localized accesses happen over a
very large chunk of address space (tens of GiB), and we'd have one fewer
type of TLB miss to worry about complexity-wise with a straight table walk.

Let me know what you'd prefer.

-Scott