Skip to content
Commit eb5c3f1c authored by Cyril Bur's avatar Cyril Bur Committed by Michael Ellerman
Browse files

powerpc: Always save/restore checkpointed regs during treclaim/trecheckpoint



Lazy save and restore of FP/Altivec means that a userspace process can
be sent to userspace with FP or Altivec disabled and loaded only as
required (by way of an FP/Altivec unavailable exception). Transactional
Memory complicates this situation as a transaction could be started
without FP/Altivec being loaded up. This causes the hardware to
checkpoint incorrect registers. Handling FP/Altivec unavailable
exceptions while a thread is transactional requires a reclaim and
recheckpoint to ensure the CPU has correct state for both sets of
registers.

tm_reclaim() has optimisations to not always save the FP/Altivec
registers to the checkpointed save area. This was originally done
because the caller might have information that the checkpointed
registers aren't valid due to lazy save and restore. We've also been a
little vague as to how tm_reclaim() leaves the FP/Altivec state since it
doesn't necessarily always save it to the thread struct. This has lead
to an (incorrect) assumption that it leaves the checkpointed state on
the CPU.

tm_recheckpoint() has similar optimisations in reverse. It may not
always reload the checkpointed FP/Altivec registers from the thread
struct before the trecheckpoint. It is therefore quite unclear where it
expects to get the state from. This didn't help with the assumption
made about tm_reclaim().

These optimisations sit in what is by definition a slow path. If a
process has to go through a reclaim/recheckpoint then its transaction
will be doomed on returning to userspace. This mean that the process
will be unable to complete its transaction and be forced to its failure
handler. This is already an out if line case for userspace. Furthermore,
the cost of copying 64 times 128 bits from registers isn't very long[0]
(at all) on modern processors. As such it appears these optimisations
have only served to increase code complexity and are unlikely to have
had a measurable performance impact.

Our transactional memory handling has been riddled with bugs. A cause
of this has been difficulty in following the code flow, code complexity
has not been our friend here. It makes sense to remove these
optimisations in favour of a (hopefully) more stable implementation.

This patch does mean that some times the assembly will needlessly save
'junk' registers which will subsequently get overwritten with the
correct value by the C code which calls the assembly function. This
small inefficiency is far outweighed by the reduction in complexity for
general TM code, context switching paths, and transactional facility
unavailable exception handler.

0: I tried to measure it once for other work and found that it was
hiding in the noise of everything else I was working with. I find it
exceedingly likely this will be the case here.

Signed-off-by: default avatarCyril Bur <cyrilbur@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMichael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
parent 91381b9c
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment