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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/x86/tlb.txt')
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diff --git a/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt b/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt new file mode 100644 index 000000000..39d172326 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +When the kernel unmaps or modified the attributes of a range of +memory, it has two choices: + 1. Flush the entire TLB with a two-instruction sequence. This is + a quick operation, but it causes collateral damage: TLB entries + from areas other than the one we are trying to flush will be + destroyed and must be refilled later, at some cost. + 2. Use the invlpg instruction to invalidate a single page at a + time. This could potentialy cost many more instructions, but + it is a much more precise operation, causing no collateral + damage to other TLB entries. + +Which method to do depends on a few things: + 1. The size of the flush being performed. A flush of the entire + address space is obviously better performed by flushing the + entire TLB than doing 2^48/PAGE_SIZE individual flushes. + 2. The contents of the TLB. If the TLB is empty, then there will + be no collateral damage caused by doing the global flush, and + all of the individual flush will have ended up being wasted + work. + 3. The size of the TLB. The larger the TLB, the more collateral + damage we do with a full flush. So, the larger the TLB, the + more attrative an individual flush looks. Data and + instructions have separate TLBs, as do different page sizes. + 4. The microarchitecture. The TLB has become a multi-level + cache on modern CPUs, and the global flushes have become more + expensive relative to single-page flushes. + +There is obviously no way the kernel can know all these things, +especially the contents of the TLB during a given flush. The +sizes of the flush will vary greatly depending on the workload as +well. There is essentially no "right" point to choose. + +You may be doing too many individual invalidations if you see the +invlpg instruction (or instructions _near_ it) show up high in +profiles. If you believe that individual invalidations being +called too often, you can lower the tunable: + + /sys/kernel/debug/x86/tlb_single_page_flush_ceiling + +This will cause us to do the global flush for more cases. +Lowering it to 0 will disable the use of the individual flushes. +Setting it to 1 is a very conservative setting and it should +never need to be 0 under normal circumstances. + +Despite the fact that a single individual flush on x86 is +guaranteed to flush a full 2MB [1], hugetlbfs always uses the full +flushes. THP is treated exactly the same as normal memory. + +You might see invlpg inside of flush_tlb_mm_range() show up in +profiles, or you can use the trace_tlb_flush() tracepoints. to +determine how long the flush operations are taking. + +Essentially, you are balancing the cycles you spend doing invlpg +with the cycles that you spend refilling the TLB later. + +You can measure how expensive TLB refills are by using +performance counters and 'perf stat', like this: + +perf stat -e + cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x84,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_duration/, + cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x82,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_completed/, + cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x4,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_duration/, + cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x2,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_completed/, + cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x4,name=itlb_misses_walk_duration/, + cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x2,name=itlb_misses_walk_completed/ + +That works on an IvyBridge-era CPU (i5-3320M). Different CPUs +may have differently-named counters, but they should at least +be there in some form. You can use pmu-tools 'ocperf list' +(https://github.com/andikleen/pmu-tools) to find the right +counters for a given CPU. + +1. A footnote in Intel's SDM "4.10.4.2 Recommended Invalidation" + says: "One execution of INVLPG is sufficient even for a page + with size greater than 4 KBytes." |