Re: [PATCH 3/3] perf record: mmap output file

[David Ahern]

On 10/8/13 11:59 PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> Here are some thoughts on how 'perf record' tracing performance could be
> further improved:
>
> 1)
>
> The use of non-temporal stores (MOVNTQ) to copy the ring-buffer into the
> file buffer makes sure the CPU cache is not trashed by the copying - which
> is the largest 'collateral damage' copying does.
>
> glibc does not appear to expose non-temporal instructions so it's going to
> be architecture dependent - but we could build the copy_user_nocache()
> function from the kernel proper (or copy it - we could even simplify it:
> knowing that only large and page aligned buffers are going to be copied
> with it).
>
> See how tools/perf/bench/mem-mem* does that to be able to measure the
> kernel's memcpy() and memset() function performance.

Forgot about this suggestion as well. Added to the list for v3.

> 2)
>
> Yet another method would be to avoid the copies altogether via the splice
> system-call - see:
>
> 	git grep splice kernel/trace/
>
> To make splice low-overhead we'd have to introduce a mode to not mmap the
> data part of the perf ring-buffer and splice the data straight from the
> perf fd into a temporary pipe and over from the pipe into the target file
> (or socket).

I looked into splice and it was not clear it would be a good match. 
First, perf is setup to pull data from mmap's and there is not a 1:1 
association between mmap's and fd's (fd_in for splice). Second and more 
importantly, splice is also a system call and it would have to be 
invoked for each mmap each trip through the loop -- just like write() 
does today -- so it does not solve the feedback loop problem.

> OTOH non-temporal stores are incredibly simple and memory bandwidth is
> plenty on modern systems so I'd certainly try that route first.

I'll take a look.

David
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