linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 4/5] x86/asm/entry/32: Replace RESTORE_RSI_RDI[

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Date:	Thu, 18 Jun 2015 11:31:34 +0200
From:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>
To:	Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@...hat.com>
Cc:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
	Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
	Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@...il.com>,
	Alexei Starovoitov <ast@...mgrid.com>,
	Will Drewry <wad@...omium.org>,
	Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>, x86@...nel.org,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 4/5] x86/asm/entry/32: Replace RESTORE_RSI_RDI[_RDX] with
 open-coded 32-bit reads


* Denys Vlasenko <dvlasenk@...hat.com> wrote:

> On 06/15/2015 10:20 PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> >> Actually, ecx and r11 need to be loaded first. They are not so much "restored" 
> >> as "prepared for SYSRET insn". Every cycle lost in loading these delays SYSRET. 
> >> [...]
> > 
> > So in the typical case they will still be cached, and so their max latency should 
> > be around 3 cycles.
> 
> If syscall flushes caches (say, a large read), or sleeps
> and CPU schedules away, then pt_regs->ip,flags are evicted
> and need to be reloaded.
> 
> > In fact because they are memory loads, they don't really have dependencies,
> > they should be available to SYSRET almost immediately,
> 
> They depend on the memory data.
> 
> > i.e. within a cycle - and 
> > there's no reason to believe why these loads wouldn't pipeline properly and 
> > parallelize with the many other things SYSRET has to do to organize a return to 
> > user-space, before it can actually use the target RIP and RFLAGS.
> 
> This does not sound right.
> 
> If it takes, say, 20 cycles to pull data from e.g. L3 cache to ECX,
> then SYSRET can't possibly complete sooner than in 20 cycles.

Yeah, that's true, but my point is: SYSRET has to do a lot of other things 
(permission checks, loading the user mode state - most of which are unrelated to 
R11/RCX), which take dozens of cycles, and which are probably overlapped with any 
cache misses on arguments such as R11/RCX.

It's not impossible that reordering helps, for example if SYSRET has some internal 
dependencies that makes it parallelism worse than ideal - but I'd complicate this 
code only if it gives a measurable improvement for cache-cold syscall performance.

Thanks,

	Ingo
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