On Aug 20, 2019, at 6:57 AM, Dave Hansen dave.hansen@intel.com wrote:
On 8/20/19 12:51 AM, Song Liu wrote:
In our x86_64 kernel, pti_clone_pgtable() fails to clone 7 PMDs because of this issuse, including PMD for the irq entry table. For a memcache like workload, this introduces about 4.5x more iTLB-load and about 2.5x more iTLB-load-misses on a Skylake CPU.
I was surprised that this manifests as a performance issue. Usually messing up PTI page table manipulation means you get to experience the jobs of debugging triple faults. But, it makes sense if its this line:
/* * Note that this will undo _some_ of the work that * pti_set_kernel_image_nonglobal() did to clear the * global bit. */ pti_clone_pgtable(start, end_clone, PTI_LEVEL_KERNEL_IMAGE);which is restoring the Global bit.
*But*, that shouldn't get hit on a Skylake CPU since those have PCIDs and shouldn't have a global kernel image. Could you confirm whether PCIDs are supported on this CPU?
Yes, pcid is listed in /proc/cpuinfo.
Thanks, Song