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Date:	Tue, 12 Nov 2013 14:50:05 -0500
From:	Neil Horman <nhorman@...driver.com>
To:	Joe Perches <joe@...ches.com>
Cc:	netdev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>, Dave Jones <davej@...hat.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, sebastien.dugue@...l.net,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, x86@...nel.org,
	Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] x86: add prefetching to do_csum]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 09:33:35AM -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-11-12 at 12:12 -0500, Neil Horman wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 05:42:22PM -0800, Joe Perches wrote:
> > > Hi again Neil.
> > > 
> > > Forwarding on to netdev with a concern as to how often
> > > do_csum is used via csum_partial for very short headers
> > > and what impact any prefetch would have there.
> > > 
> > > Also, what changed in your test environment?
> > > 
> > > Why are the new values 5+% higher cycles/byte than the
> > > previous values?
> > > 
> > > And here is the new table reformatted:
> > > 
> > > len	set	iterations	Readahead cachelines vs cycles/byte
> > > 			1	2	3	4	6	10	20
> > > 1500B	64MB	1000000	1.4342	1.4300	1.4350	1.4350	1.4396	1.4315	1.4555
> > > 1500B	128MB	1000000	1.4312	1.4346	1.4271	1.4284	1.4376	1.4318	1.4431
> > > 1500B	256MB	1000000	1.4309	1.4254	1.4316	1.4308	1.4418	1.4304	1.4367
> > > 1500B	512MB	1000000	1.4534	1.4516	1.4523	1.4563	1.4554	1.4644	1.4590
> > > 9000B	64MB	1000000	0.8921	0.8924	0.8932	0.8949	0.8952	0.8939	0.8985
> > > 9000B	128MB	1000000	0.8841	0.8856	0.8845	0.8854	0.8861	0.8879	0.8861
> > > 9000B	256MB	1000000	0.8806	0.8821	0.8813	0.8833	0.8814	0.8827	0.8895
> > > 9000B	512MB	1000000	0.8838	0.8852	0.8841	0.8865	0.8846	0.8901	0.8865
> > > 64KB	64MB	1000000	0.8132	0.8136	0.8132	0.8150	0.8147	0.8149	0.8147
> > > 64KB	128MB	1000000	0.8013	0.8014	0.8013	0.8020	0.8041	0.8015	0.8033
> > > 64KB	256MB	1000000	0.7956	0.7959	0.7956	0.7976	0.7981	0.7967	0.7973
> > > 64KB	512MB	1000000	0.7934	0.7932	0.7937	0.7951	0.7954	0.7943	0.7948
> > > 
> > 
> > 
> > There we go, thats better:
> > len   set     iterations      Readahead cachelines vs cycles/byte
> > 			1	2	3	4	5	10	20
> > 1500B 64MB	1000000	1.3638	1.3288	1.3464	1.3505	1.3586	1.3527	1.3408
> > 1500B 128MB	1000000	1.3394	1.3357	1.3625	1.3456	1.3536	1.3400	1.3410
> > 1500B 256MB	1000000 1.3773	1.3362	1.3419	1.3548	1.3543	1.3442	1.4163
> > 1500B 512MB	1000000 1.3442	1.3390	1.3434	1.3505	1.3767	1.3513	1.3820
> > 9000B 64MB	1000000 0.8505	0.8492	0.8521	0.8593	0.8566	0.8577	0.8547
> > 9000B 128MB	1000000 0.8507	0.8507	0.8523	0.8627	0.8593	0.8670	0.8570
> > 9000B 256MB	1000000 0.8516	0.8515	0.8568	0.8546	0.8549	0.8609	0.8596
> > 9000B 512MB	1000000 0.8517	0.8526	0.8552	0.8675	0.8547	0.8526	0.8621
> > 64KB  64MB	1000000 0.7679	0.7689	0.7688	0.7716	0.7714	0.7722	0.7716
> > 64KB  128MB	1000000 0.7683	0.7687	0.7710	0.7690	0.7717	0.7694	0.7703
> > 64KB  256MB	1000000 0.7680	0.7703	0.7688	0.7689	0.7726	0.7717	0.7713
> > 64KB  512MB	1000000 0.7692	0.7690	0.7701	0.7705	0.7698	0.7693	0.7735
> > 
> > 
> > So, the numbers are correct now that I returned my hardware to its previous
> > interrupt affinity state, but the trend seems to be the same (namely that there
> > isn't a clear one).  We seem to find peak performance around a readahead of 2
> > cachelines, but its very small (about 3%), and its inconsistent (larger set
> > sizes fall to either side of that stride).  So I don't see it as a clear win.  I
> > still think we should probably scrap the readahead for now, just take the perf
> > bits, and revisit this when we can use the vector instructions or the
> > independent carry chain instructions to improve this more consistently.
> > 
> > Thoughts
> 
> Perhaps a single prefetch, not of the first addr but of
> the addr after PREFETCH_STRIDE would work best but only
> if length is > PREFETCH_STRIDE.
> 
> I'd try:
> 
> 	if (len > PREFETCH_STRIDE)
> 		prefetch(buf + PREFETCH_STRIDE);
> 	while (count64) {
> 		etc...
> 	}
> 
> I still don't know how much that impacts very short lengths.
> 
> Can you please add a 20 byte length to your tests?
> 
> 


Sure, I modified the code so that we only prefetched 2 cache lines ahead, but
only if the overall length of the input buffer is more than 2 cache lines.
Below are the results (all counts are the average of 1000000 iterations of the
csum operation, as previous tests were, I just omitted that column).

len	set	cycles/byte	cycles/byte	improvement
		no prefetch	prefetch
===========================================================
20B	64MB	45.014989	44.402432	1.3%
20B	128MB	44.900317	46.146447	-2.7%
20B	256MB	45.303223	48.193623	-6.3%
20B	512MB	45.615301	44.486872	2.2%
1500B	64MB	1.364365	1.332285	1.9%
1500B	128MB	1.373945	1.335907	1.4%
1500B	256MB	1.356971	1.339084	1.2%
1500B	512MB	1.351091	1.341431	0.7%
9000B	64MB	0.850966	0.851077	-0.1%
9000B	128MB	0.851013	0.850366	0.1%
9000B	256MB	0.854212	0.851033	0.3%
9000B	512MB	0.857346	0.851744	0.7%
64KB	64MB	0.768224	0.768450	~0%
64KB	128MB	0.768706	0.768884	~0%
64KB	256MB	0.768459	0.768445	~0%
64KB	512MB	0.768808	0.769404	-0.1%

The 20 byte results seem to have a few outliers.  I'm guessing the improvement
came from good fortune in that the random selection happened to hit on the same
range of numbers a few times over, so we hit already cached data.  I would
expect them to run more slowly (as the 2 and 3 rows illustrate), since 20B is
less than the 128 bytes in 2 cachelines on my test system, and so all were doing
is adding in an additional comparison and jump per iteration.  Our sweet spot is
the 1500 byte range, giving us a small performance boost, but that quickly gets
lost in the noise as the buffer size grows beyond that.

I'm still left thinking we should just abandon the prefetch at this point and
keep the perf code until we have new instructions to help us with this further,
unless you see something I dont.

Neil

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