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Commit af3bdb99 authored by Andi Kleen's avatar Andi Kleen Committed by Ingo Molnar
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perf/x86/intel: Add a separate Arch Perfmon v4 PMI handler



Implements counter freezing for Arch Perfmon v4 (Skylake and
newer). This allows to speed up the PMI handler by avoiding
unnecessary MSR writes and make it more accurate.

The Arch Perfmon v4 PMI handler is substantially different than
the older PMI handler.

Differences to the old handler:

- It relies on counter freezing, which eliminates several MSR
  writes from the PMI handler and lowers the overhead significantly.

  It makes the PMI handler more accurate, as all counters get
  frozen atomically as soon as any counter overflows. So there is
  much less counting of the PMI handler itself.

  With the freezing we don't need to disable or enable counters or
  PEBS. Only BTS which does not support auto-freezing still needs to
  be explicitly managed.

- The PMU acking is done at the end, not the beginning.
  This makes it possible to avoid manual enabling/disabling
  of the PMU, instead we just rely on the freezing/acking.

- The APIC is acked before reenabling the PMU, which avoids
  problems with LBRs occasionally not getting unfreezed on Skylake.

- Looping is only needed to workaround a corner case which several PMIs
  are very close to each other. For common cases, the counters are freezed
  during PMI handler. It doesn't need to do re-check.

This patch:

- Adds code to enable v4 counter freezing
- Fork <=v3 and >=v4 PMI handlers into separate functions.
- Add kernel parameter to disable counter freezing. It took some time to
  debug counter freezing, so in case there are new problems we added an
  option to turn it off. Would not expect this to be used until there
  are new bugs.
- Only for big core. The patch for small core will be posted later
  separately.

Performance:

When profiling a kernel build on Kabylake with different perf options,
measuring the length of all NMI handlers using the nmi handler
trace point:

V3 is without counter freezing.
V4 is with counter freezing.
The value is the average cost of the PMI handler.
(lower is better)

perf options    `           V3(ns) V4(ns)  delta
-c 100000                   1088   894     -18%
-g -c 100000                1862   1646    -12%
--call-graph lbr -c 100000  3649   3367    -8%
--c.g. dwarf -c 100000      2248   1982    -12%

Signed-off-by: default avatarAndi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarKan Liang <kan.liang@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Alexander Shishkin <alexander.shishkin@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@redhat.com>
Cc: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Vince Weaver <vincent.weaver@maine.edu>
Cc: acme@kernel.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1533712328-2834-2-git-send-email-kan.liang@linux.intel.com
Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
parent ba12d20e
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