Put x86 entry code into a separate link section: .entry.text.
Separating the entry text section seems to have performance
benefits - caused by more efficient instruction cache usage.
Running hackbench with perf stat --repeat showed that the change
compresses the icache footprint. The icache load miss rate went
down by about 15%:
before patch:
19417627 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.147% )
after patch:
16490788 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.180% )
The motivation of the patch was to fix a particular kprobes
bug that relates to the entry text section, the performance
advantage was discovered accidentally.
Whole perf output follows:
- results for current tip tree:
Performance counter stats for './hackbench/hackbench 10' (500 runs):
19417627 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.147% )
2676914223 instructions # 0.497 IPC ( +- 0.079% )
5389516026 cycles ( +- 0.144% )
0.206267711 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.138% )
- results for current tip tree with the patch applied:
Performance counter stats for './hackbench/hackbench 10' (500 runs):
16490788 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.180% )
2717734941 instructions # 0.502 IPC ( +- 0.079% )
5414756975 cycles ( +- 0.148% )
0.206747566 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.137% )
Signed-off-by: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Cc: masami.hiramatsu.pt@hitachi.com
Cc: ananth@in.ibm.com
Cc: davem@davemloft.net
Cc: 2nddept-manager@sdl.hitachi.co.jp
LKML-Reference: <20110307181039.GB15197@jolsa.redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
ea7145477a