Re: [PATCH] POWER: perf_event: Skip updating kernel counters ifregister value shrinks

From: Eric B Munson
Date: Wed Mar 30 2011 - 14:37:08 EST


On Wed, 30 Mar 2011, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

> On Tue, 2011-03-29 at 10:25 -0400, Eric B Munson wrote:
> > Here I made the assumption that the hardware would never remove more events in
> > a speculative roll back than it had added. This is not a situation I
> > encoutered in my limited testing, so I didn't think underflow was possible. I
> > will send out a V2 using the signed 32 bit delta and remeber to CC stable
> > this time.
>
> I'm not thinking about underflow but rollover... or that isn't possible
> with those counters ? IE. They don't wrap back to 0 after hitting
> ffffffff ?
>

They do roll over to 0 after ffffffff, but I thought that case was already
covered by the perf_event_interrupt. Are you concerned that we will reset a
counter and speculative roll back will underflow that counter?

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