[PATCH v3 00/20] Speculative page faults

[Michael Ellerman]

Laurent Dufour <ldufour at linux.vnet.ibm.com> writes:

> Hi Andrew,
>
> On 28/09/2017 22:38, Andrew Morton wrote:
>> On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 14:29:02 +0200 Laurent Dufour <ldufour at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>> Laurent's [0/n] provides some nice-looking performance benefits for
>>>> workloads which are chosen to show performance benefits(!) but, alas,
>>>> no quantitative testing results for workloads which we may suspect will
>>>> be harmed by the changes(?).  Even things as simple as impact upon
>>>> single-threaded pagefault-intensive workloads and its effect upon
>>>> CONFIG_SMP=n .text size?
>>>
>>> I forgot to mention in my previous email the impact on the .text section.
>>>
>>> Here are the metrics I got :
>>>
>>> .text size	UP		SMP		Delta
>>> 4.13-mmotm	8444201		8964137		6.16%
>>> '' +spf		8452041		8971929		6.15%
>>> 	Delta	0.09%		0.09%	
>>>
>>> No major impact as you could see.
>> 
>> 8k text increase seems rather a lot actually.  That's a lot more
>> userspace cacheclines that get evicted during a fault...
>> 
>> Is the feature actually beneficial on uniprocessor?
>
> This is useless on uniprocessor, and I will disable it on x86 when !SMP 
> by not defining __HAVE_ARCH_CALL_SPF.
> So the speculative page fault handler will not be built but the vm 
> sequence counter and the SCRU stuff will still be there. I may also make 
> it disabled through macro when __HAVE_ARCH_CALL_SPF is not defined, but 
> this may obfuscated the code a bit...
>
> On ppc64, as this feature requires book3s, it can't be built without SMP 
> support.

Book3S doesn't force SMP, eg. PMAC is Book3S but can be built with SMP=n.

It's true that POWERNV and PSERIES both force SMP, and those are the
platforms used on modern Book3S CPUs.

cheers