tree 2fe54df816abfe8c6010d277c79fbe18aa5c4082
parent a63eaf34ae60bdb067a354cc8def2e8f4a01f5f4
author Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> 1242966442 +1000
committer Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> 1242987500 +0200

perf_counter: Optimize context switch between identical inherited contexts

When monitoring a process and its descendants with a set of inherited
counters, we can often get the situation in a context switch where
both the old (outgoing) and new (incoming) process have the same set
of counters, and their values are ultimately going to be added together.
In that situation it doesn't matter which set of counters are used to
count the activity for the new process, so there is really no need to
go through the process of reading the hardware counters and updating
the old task's counters and then setting up the PMU for the new task.

This optimizes the context switch in this situation.  Instead of
scheduling out the perf_counter_context for the old task and
scheduling in the new context, we simply transfer the old context
to the new task and keep using it without interruption.  The new
context gets transferred to the old task.  This means that both
tasks still have a valid perf_counter_context, so no special case
is introduced when the old task gets scheduled in again, either on
this CPU or another CPU.

The equivalence of contexts is detected by keeping a pointer in
each cloned context pointing to the context it was cloned from.
To cope with the situation where a context is changed by adding
or removing counters after it has been cloned, we also keep a
generation number on each context which is incremented every time
a context is changed.  When a context is cloned we take a copy
of the parent's generation number, and two cloned contexts are
equivalent only if they have the same parent and the same
generation number.  In order that the parent context pointer
remains valid (and is not reused), we increment the parent
context's reference count for each context cloned from it.

Since we don't have individual fds for the counters in a cloned
context, the only thing that can make two clones of a given parent
different after they have been cloned is enabling or disabling all
counters with prctl.  To account for this, we keep a count of the
number of enabled counters in each context.  Two contexts must have
the same number of enabled counters to be considered equivalent.

Here are some measurements of the context switch time as measured with
the lat_ctx benchmark from lmbench, comparing the times obtained with
and without this patch series:

		-----Unmodified-----		With this patch series
Counters:	none	2 HW	4H+4S	none	2 HW	4H+4S

2 processes:
Average		3.44	6.45	11.24	3.12	3.39	3.60
St dev		0.04	0.04	0.13	0.05	0.17	0.19

8 processes:
Average		6.45	8.79	14.00	5.57	6.23	7.57
St dev		1.27	1.04	0.88	1.42	1.46	1.42

32 processes:
Average		5.56	8.43	13.78	5.28	5.55	7.15
St dev		0.41	0.47	0.53	0.54	0.57	0.81

The numbers are the mean and standard deviation of 20 runs of
lat_ctx.  The "none" columns are lat_ctx run directly without any
counters.  The "2 HW" columns are with lat_ctx run under perfstat,
counting cycles and instructions.  The "4H+4S" columns are lat_ctx run
under perfstat with 4 hardware counters and 4 software counters
(cycles, instructions, cache references, cache misses, task
clock, context switch, cpu migrations, and page faults).

[ Impact: performance optimization of counter context-switches ]

Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Corey Ashford <cjashfor@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
LKML-Reference: <18966.10666.517218.332164@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>