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SubjectRe: [RFC PATCH 0/6] jump label v3
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 07:54:24PM -0800, Roland McGrath wrote:
> 2. optimal compiled hot path code
>
> You and Richard have been working on this in gcc and we know the state
> of it now. When we get the cold labels feature done, it will be ideal
> for -O(2?). But people mostly use -Os and there no block reordering
> gets done now (I think perhaps this even means likely/unlikely don't
> really change which path is the straight line, just the source order
> of the blocks still determines it). So we hope for more incremental
> improvements here, and maybe even really optimal code for -O2 soon.
> But at least for -Os it may not be better than "unconditional jump
> around" as the "straight line" path in the foreseeable future. As
> noted, that alone is still a nice savings over the status quo for the
> disabled case. (You gave an "average cycles saved" for this vs a load
> and test, but do you have any comparisons of how those two compare to
> no tracepoint at all?)
>

i've run that in the past, and for the nop + jump sequence its between
2 - 4 cycles on average vs. no tracepoint.


> 3. bookkeeping magic to find all the jumps to enable for a given tracepoint
>
> Here you have a working first draft, but it looks pretty clunky.
> That strcmp just makes me gag. For a first version that's still
> pretty simple, I think it should be trivial to use a pointer
> comparison there. For tracepoints, it can be the address of the
> struct tracepoint. For the general case, it can be the address of
> the global that would be flag variable in case of no asm goto support.
>
> For more incremental improvements, we could cut down on running
> through the entire table for every switch. If there are many
> different switches (as there are already for many different
> tracepoints), then you really just want to run through the
> insn-patch list for the particular switch when you toggle it.
>
> It's possible to group this all statically at link time, but all
> the linker magic hacking required to get that to go is probably
> more trouble than it's worth.
>
> A simple hack is to run through the big unsorted table at boot time
> and turn it into a contiguous table for each switch. Then
> e.g. hang each table off the per-switch global variable by the same
> name that in a no-asm-goto build would be the simple global flag.
>

that probably makes the most sense. Do a sort of the jump table and then
store an offset,length pair with each switch. I was thinking of this as follow
on optimization (the tracepoint code is already O(N) per switch toggle, where
is N = total number of all tracepoint site locations, and not O(n), where
n = number of sites per tracepoint). Certainly, if this is a gating issue for
this patchset, I can fix it now.

>
> Finally, for using this for general purposes unrelated to tracepoints,
> I envision something like:
>
> DECLARE_MOSTLY_NOT(foobar);
>
> foo(int x, int y)
> {
> if (x > y && mostly_not(foobar))
> do_foobar(x - y);
> }
>
> ... set_mostly_not(foobar, onoff);
>
> where it's:
>
> #define DECLARE_MOSTLY_NOT(name) ... __something_##name
> #define mostly_not(name) ({ int _doit = 0; __label__ _yes; \
> JUMP_LABEL(name, _yes, __something_##name); \
> if (0) _yes: __cold _doit = 1; \
> unlikely (_doit); })
>
> I don't think we've tried to figure out how well this compiles yet.
> But it shows the sort of thing that we can do to expose this feature
> in a way that's simple and unrestrictive for kernel code to use casually.
>
>

cool. the assembly output would be interesting here...

thanks,

-Jason


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