For some workloads such as arm bootup, tb_phys_hash is performance-critical.
The is due to the high frequency of accesses to the hash table, originated
by (frequent) TLB flushes that wipe out the cpu-private tb_jmp_cache's.
More info:
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-03/msg05098.html
To dig further into this I modified an arm image booting debian jessie to
immediately shut down after boot. Analysis revealed that quite a bit of time
is unnecessarily spent in tb_phys_hash: the cause is poor hashing that
results in very uneven loading of chains in the hash table's buckets;
the longest observed chain had ~550 elements.
The appended addresses this with two changes:
1) Use xxhash as the hash table's hash function. xxhash is a fast,
high-quality hashing function.
2) Feed the hashing function with not just tb_phys, but also pc and flags.
This improves performance over using just tb_phys for hashing, since that
resulted in some hash buckets having many TB's, while others getting very few;
with these changes, the longest observed chain on a single hash bucket is
brought down from ~550 to ~40.
Tests show that the other element checked for in tb_find_physical,
cs_base, is always a match when tb_phys+pc+flags are a match,
so hashing cs_base is wasteful. It could be that this is an ARM-only
thing, though. UPDATE:
On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 08:41:43 -0700, Richard Henderson wrote:
> The cs_base field is only used by i386 (in 16-bit modes), and sparc (for a TB
> consisting of only a delay slot).
> It may well still turn out to be reasonable to ignore cs_base for hashing.
BTW, after this change the hash table should not be called "tb_hash_phys"
anymore; this is addressed later in this series.
This change gives consistent bootup time improvements. I tested two
host machines:
- Intel Xeon E5-2690: 11.6% less time
- Intel i7-4790K: 19.2% less time
Increasing the number of hash buckets yields further improvements. However,
using a larger, fixed number of buckets can degrade performance for other
workloads that do not translate as many blocks (600K+ for debian-jessie arm
bootup). This is dealt with later in this series.
Reviewed-by: Sergey Fedorov <sergey.fedorov@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
Reviewed-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Emilio G. Cota <cota@braap.org>
Message-Id: <1465412133-3029-8-git-send-email-cota@braap.org>
Signed-off-by: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
QEMU README
===========
QEMU is a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator and
virtualizer.
QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without any
need for hardware virtualization support. By using dynamic translation,
it achieves very good performance. QEMU can also integrate with the Xen
and KVM hypervisors to provide emulated hardware while allowing the
hypervisor to manage the CPU. With hypervisor support, QEMU can achieve
near native performance for CPUs. When QEMU emulates CPUs directly it is
capable of running operating systems made for one machine (e.g. an ARMv7
board) on a different machine (e.g. an x86_64 PC board).
QEMU is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux
and BSD kernel interfaces. This allows binaries compiled against one
architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux PPC64 ABI) to be run on a host using a
different architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux x86_64 ABI). This does not
involve any hardware emulation, simply CPU and syscall emulation.
QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directly
by users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings.
It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level management
layers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API.
It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when using
open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager.
QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License,
version 2. For full licensing details, consult the LICENSE file.
Building
========
QEMU is multi-platform software intended to be buildable on all modern
Linux platforms, OS-X, Win32 (via the Mingw64 toolchain) and a variety
of other UNIX targets. The simple steps to build QEMU are:
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make
Complete details of the process for building and configuring QEMU for
all supported host platforms can be found in the qemu-tech.html file.
Additional information can also be found online via the QEMU website:
http://qemu-project.org/Hosts/Linux
http://qemu-project.org/Hosts/W32
Submitting patches
==================
The QEMU source code is maintained under the GIT version control system.
git clone git://git.qemu-project.org/qemu.git
When submitting patches, the preferred approach is to use 'git
format-patch' and/or 'git send-email' to format & send the mail to the
qemu-devel@nongnu.org mailing list. All patches submitted must contain
a 'Signed-off-by' line from the author. Patches should follow the
guidelines set out in the HACKING and CODING_STYLE files.
Additional information on submitting patches can be found online via
the QEMU website
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/TrivialPatches
Bug reporting
=============
The QEMU project uses Launchpad as its primary upstream bug tracker. Bugs
found when running code built from QEMU git or upstream released sources
should be reported via:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/
If using QEMU via an operating system vendor pre-built binary package, it
is preferable to report bugs to the vendor's own bug tracker first. If
the bug is also known to affect latest upstream code, it can also be
reported via launchpad.
For additional information on bug reporting consult:
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/ReportABug
Contact
=======
The QEMU community can be contacted in a number of ways, with the two
main methods being email and IRC
- qemu-devel@nongnu.org
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
- #qemu on irc.oftc.net
Information on additional methods of contacting the community can be
found online via the QEMU website:
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/StartHere
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