Re: [RFC] syscall calling convention, stts/clts, and xstate latency

From: Avi Kivity
Date: Mon Jul 25 2011 - 03:43:16 EST


On 07/25/2011 12:15 AM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> All of this makes me think that, at least on Sandy Bridge, lazy
> xstate saving is a bad optimization -- if the cache is being nice,
> save/restore is faster than twiddling the TS bit. And the cost of
> the trap when TS is set blows everything else away.

Interesting. Mind cooking up a delazying patch and measure it on
native as well? KVM generally makes exceptions more expensive, so the
effect of lazy exceptions might be less on native.

While this is true in general, kvm will trap #NM only after a host context switch or an exit to host userspace. These are supposedly rare so you won't see them a lot, especially in a benchmark scenario with just one guest.

("host context switch" includes switching to the idle thread when the guest executes HLT, something I tried to optimize in the past but it proved too difficult for the gain)

--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function

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