linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] kernel: add support for 256-bit IO access

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Date:   Thu, 22 Mar 2018 17:44:05 +0000
From:   Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>
To:     Alexei Starovoitov <alexei.starovoitov@...il.com>
Cc:     Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        David Laight <David.Laight@...lab.com>,
        Rahul Lakkireddy <rahul.lakkireddy@...lsio.com>,
        "x86@...nel.org" <x86@...nel.org>,
        "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "netdev@...r.kernel.org" <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
        "mingo@...hat.com" <mingo@...hat.com>,
        "hpa@...or.com" <hpa@...or.com>,
        "davem@...emloft.net" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        "akpm@...ux-foundation.org" <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        "ganeshgr@...lsio.com" <ganeshgr@...lsio.com>,
        "nirranjan@...lsio.com" <nirranjan@...lsio.com>,
        "indranil@...lsio.com" <indranil@...lsio.com>,
        Andy Lutomirski <luto@...nel.org>,
        Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
        Fenghua Yu <fenghua.yu@...el.com>,
        Eric Biggers <ebiggers3@...il.com>,
        Daniel Borkmann <daniel@...earbox.net>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] kernel: add support for 256-bit IO access

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 5:40 PM, Alexei Starovoitov
<alexei.starovoitov@...il.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 10:33:43AM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>>
>>  - I think the BPF JIT, whose byte code machine languge is used by an
>>    increasing number of kernel subsystems, could benefit from having vector ops.
>>    It would possibly allow the handling of floating point types.
>
> this is on our todo list already.
> To process certain traffic inside BPF in XDP we'd like to have access to
> floating point. The current workaround is to precompute the math and do
> bpf map lookup instead.
> Since XDP processing of packets is batched (typically up to napi budget
> of 64 packets at a time), we can, in theory, wrap the loop with
> kernel_fpu_begin/end and it will be cleaner and faster,
> but the work hasn't started yet.
> The microbenchmark numbers you quoted for xsave/xrestore look promising,
> so we probably will focus on it soon.
>
> Another use case for vector insns is to accelerate fib/lpm lookups
> which is likely beneficial for kernel overall regardless of bpf usage.
>

This is a further argument for the deferred restore approach IMO.
With deferred restore, kernel_fpu_begin() + kernel_fpu_end() has very
low amortized cost as long as we do lots of work in the kernel before
re-entering userspace.  For XDP workloads, this could be a pretty big
win, I imagine.

Someone just needs to do the nasty x86 work.