linux-kernel - Re: cli/sti vs local_cmpxchg and local_add

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Message-Id: <200903171705.35599.nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Date:	Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:05:35 +1100
From:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
To:	Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@...ymtl.ca>
Cc:	"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Josh Boyer <jwboyer@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, ltt-dev@...ts.casi.polymtl.ca
Subject: Re: cli/sti vs local_cmpxchg and local_add_return

On Tuesday 17 March 2009 12:32:20 Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am trying to get access to some non-x86 hardware to run some atomic
> primitive benchmarks for a paper on LTTng I am preparing. That should be
> useful to argue about performance benefit of per-cpu atomic operations
> vs interrupt disabling. I would like to run the following benchmark
> module on CONFIG_SMP :
>
> - PowerPC
> - MIPS
> - ia64
> - alpha
>
> usage :
> make
> insmod test-cmpxchg-nolock.ko
> insmod: error inserting 'test-cmpxchg-nolock.ko': -1 Resource temporarily
> unavailable dmesg (see dmesg output)
>
> If some of you would be kind enough to run my test module provided below
> and provide the results of these tests on a recent kernel (2.6.26~2.6.29
> should be good) along with their cpuinfo, I would greatly appreciate.
>
> Here are the CAS results for various Intel-based architectures :
>
> Architecture         | Speedup                      |      CAS     |       
>  Interrupts         |
>
>                      | (cli + sti) / local cmpxchg  | local | sync | Enable
>                      | (sti) | Disable (cli)
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>---------------------- Intel Pentium 4      | 5.24                         |
>  25   | 81   | 70           | 61          | AMD Athlon(tm)64 X2  | 4.57    
>                     |  7    | 17   | 17           | 15          | Intel
> Core2          | 6.33                         |  6    | 30   | 20          
> | 18          | Intel Xeon E5405     | 5.25                         |  8   
> | 24   | 20           | 22          |
>
> The benefit expected on PowerPC, ia64 and alpha should principally come
> from removed memory barriers in the local primitives.

Benefit versus what? I think all of those architectures can do SMP
atomic compare exchange sequences without barriers, can't they?

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