Thread (14 messages) 14 messages, 4 authors, 2012-09-25

Re: [PATCH v4 0/8] Avoid cache trashing on clearing huge/gigantic page

From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date: 2012-09-13 23:05:12
Also in: linux-mips, linux-mm, linux-sh, lkml, sparclinux

On Mon, 20 Aug 2012 16:52:29 +0300
"Kirill A. Shutemov" [off-list ref] wrote:
Clearing a 2MB huge page will typically blow away several levels of CPU
caches.  To avoid this only cache clear the 4K area around the fault
address and use a cache avoiding clears for the rest of the 2MB area.

This patchset implements cache avoiding version of clear_page only for
x86. If an architecture wants to provide cache avoiding version of
clear_page it should to define ARCH_HAS_USER_NOCACHE to 1 and implement
clear_page_nocache() and clear_user_highpage_nocache().
Patchset looks nice to me, but the changelogs are terribly short of
performance measurements.  For this sort of change I do think it is
important that pretty exhaustive testing be performed, and that the
results (or a readable summary of them) be shown.  And that testing
should be designed to probe for slowdowns, not just the speedups!
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