Re: percpu-2.5.63-bk5-1 (properly generated)

[William Lee Irwin III]

At some point in the past, I wrote:
>> All users of page_zone(). The question you're (hopefully) about to
>> answer is whether it was the division or something else like codesize
>> or the newly introduced indirection.
>> If that is still seeing page_zone() suckage, I'll rip zone_table[] out
>> of it entirely.

On Sun, Mar 02, 2003 at 03:13:22PM -0800, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> Still degraded: diffprofile:
>        781     1.6% total
>        346     1.0% default_idle
>        217    10.1% __down
>         79    12.0% __wake_up
>         51    70.8% page_address
>         32    66.7% kmap_atomic
>         24     5.3% page_remove_rmap
>         16    19.3% clear_page_tables
>         14     4.6% release_pages
>         13    33.3% path_release
>         13     6.7% __copy_to_user_ll
>         13   260.0% bad_range
>         11     1.3% do_schedule
>         10    15.6% pte_alloc_one

The largest issue is probably idle time, which appears to have gone up
enormously in absolute terms. I'll split the pieces out and see what
happens. From this it looks like the indirection is a slowdown, but the
cost in absolute terms is insignificant, as there aren't enough samples.

There's no clear reason __down() should have become more expensive,
nor __wake_up(). I'd really like an instruction-level profile. AFAICT
node_nr_running is 100% harmless instruction-wise, unless the copy
propagated a nonzero value (which would be a bug), and per_cpu
runqueues are largely unknown, but would be accountable to schedule(),
which is not particularly offensive wrt. additional cpu time.

Some kind of dump of internal scheduler statistics to verify they've
been faithfully preserved would help also. Instruction-level cpu and
cache profiling would also be helpful. There may very well be an odd
cache coloring conflict at work here. If it's too big to take on, I
might need some kind of help or a pointer to a package so I don't have
to crap all over userspace for the benchmark. I may also need a .config
in order to reproduce the usual bullcrap like (#@%$ing) link order.

-- wli