On Sun, 2006-09-24 at 18:03 -0700, Jeremy Fitzhardinge wrote:

Rusty Russell wrote:

quoted

quoted

So are symbols referencing the .data.percpu section 0-based?  Wouldn't 
you need to subtract __per_cpu_start from the symbols to get a 0-based 
segment offset?
    

I don't think I understand the question.

The .data.percpu section is the "template" per-cpu section, freed along
with other initdata: after setup_percpu_areas() is called, it is not
supposed to be used.  Around that time, the gs segment is set up based
at __per_cpu_offset[cpu], so "%gs:<varname>" accesses the local version.
  

If you do

    DEFINE_PER_CPU(int, foo);

then this ends up defining per_cpu__foo in .data.percpu.  Since 
.data.percpu is part of the init data section, it starts at some address 
X (not 0), so the real offset into the actual per-cpu memory is actually 
(per_cpu__foo - __per_cpu_start).  setup_per_cpu_areas() builds this 
delta into the __per_cpu_offset[], and so it means that the base of your 
%gs segment is at -__per_cpu_start from the actual start of the CPU's 
per-cpu memory, and the limit has to be correspondingly larger.  Which 
is a bit ugly.

Hi Jeremy!

	You're thinking of it in a convoluted way, by converting to offsets
from the per-cpu section, then converting it back.  How about this
explanation: the local cpu's versions are offset from where the compiler
thinks they are by __per_cpu_offset[cpu].  We set the segment base to
__per_cpu_offset[cpu], so "%gs:per_cpu__foo" gets us straight to the
local cpu version.  __per_cpu_offset[cpu] is always positive (kernel
image sits at bottom of kernel address space).

  Especially since "__per_cpu_start" is actually very 
large, and so this scheme pretty much relies on being able to wrap 
around the segment limit, and will be very bad for Xen.

__per_cpu_start is large, yes.  But there's no reason to use it in
address calculation.  The second half of your statement is not correct.

An alternative is to put the "-__per_cpu_start" into the addressing mode 
when constructing the address of the per-cpu variable.

I think you're thinking of TLS relocations?  I don't use them...

Rusty.
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