Re: [Xen-ia64-devel] One unstablity in fast syscall path

[Tristan Gingold <Tristan.Gingold@xxxxxxxx>]

Le Lundi 19 Juin 2006 15:35, Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins) a écrit :
> > > > On this point VTi may have a real advantage over
> >
> > paravirtualization.
> >
> > > Could you explain further?
> >
> > Yes.
> > The virtualization handler has the opcode in GR25.
> > I don't know the amount of PAL code involved, but the
> > hardware might provides
> > the opcode directly from the pipeline.  The VM doesn't have
> > to do the fecth,
> > which is time and cache consuming.
>
> No the hardware does not provide the opcode directly, though
> perhaps it will in future (post-Montecito) implementations.
> I believe that PAL is doing the same thing that Xen is
> doing to fetch the opcode, except since it is doing it
> sooner, there is a higher probability that it will be
> successful.  And I suspect that it may be doing the
> "slow path" every time as it is probably not capable
> of handling (and recovering from) TLB misses.  I'm not
> sure I would call this an advantage.
I suspected this behavior too.  So, this is only a *potential* advantage ;-)

> Perhaps Intel can comment more here... I'm not sure what
> info is public.
Yes, I suppose this info is not public...

Tristan.

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