[Xen-devel] Re: lmbench lat_mmap slowdown with CONFIG_PARAVIRT

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Ingo Molnar <mingo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>   
> > > Times I believe are in nanoseconds for lmbench, anyway lower is 
> > > better.
> > > non pv   AVG=464.22 STD=5.56
> > > paravirt AVG=502.87 STD=7.36
> > >
> > > Nearly 10% performance drop here, which is quite a bit... hopefully 
> > > people are testing the speed of their PV implementations against 
> > > non-PV bare metal :)
> > >       
> > Ouch, that looks unacceptably expensive. All the major distros turn 
> > CONFIG_PARAVIRT on. paravirt_ops was introduced in x86 with the express 
> > promise to have no measurable runtime overhead.
> >     
> Here are some more precise stats done via hw counters on a perfcounters 
> kernel using 'timec', running a modified version of the 'mmap performance 
> stress-test' app i made years ago.
> The MM benchmark app can be downloaded from:
>
>    http://redhat.com/~mingo/misc/mmap-perf.c
>
> timec.c can be picked up from:
>
>    http://redhat.com/~mingo/perfcounters/timec.c
>
> mmap-perf conducts 1 million mmap()/munmap()/mremap() calls, and touches 
> the mapped area as well with a certain chance. The patterns are 
> pseudo-random and the random seed is initialized to the same value so 
> repeated runs produce the exact same mmap sequence.
> I ran the test with a single thread and bound to a single core:
>
>   # taskset 2 timec -e -5,-4,-3,0,1,2,3 ./mmap-perf 1
>
> [ I ran it as root - so that kernel-space hardware-counter statistics are 
>   included as well. ]
> The results are quite surprisingly candid about the true costs of 
> paravirt_ops on the native kernel's overhead (CONFIG_PARAVIRT=y):
> -----------------------------------------------
> | Performance counter stats for './mmap-perf' |
> -----------------------------------------------
> |                |
> |  x86-defconfig |   PARAVIRT=y         
> |------------------------------------------------------------------
> |
> |    1311.554526 |  1360.624932  task clock ticks (msecs)    +3.74%
> |                |
> |              1 |            1  CPU migrations
> |             91 |           79  context switches
> |          55945 |        55943  pagefaults
> |    ............................................
> |     3781392474 |   3918777174  CPU cycles                  +3.63%
> |     1957153827 |   2161280486  instructions               +10.43%
>   
!!

> |       50234816 |     51303520  cache references            +2.12%
> |        5428258 |      5583728  cache misses                +2.86%
>   
Is this I or D, or combined?

> |                |
> |    1314.782469 |  1363.694447  time elapsed (msecs)        +3.72%
> |                |
> -----------------------------------
>
> The most surprising element is that in the paravirt_ops case we run 204 
> million more instructions - out of the ~2000 million instructions total. 
>
> That's an increase of over 10%!
>   
Yow!  That's pretty awful.  We knew that static instruction count was 
up, but wouldn't have thought that it would hit the dynamic instruction 
count so much...
I think there are some immediate tweaks we can make to the code 
generated for each call site,  which will help to an extent.
   J

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