After looking at our system call path, Mary Brown suggested that we
should put all mfspr SRR* instructions before any mtspr SRR*.
To test this I used a very simple null syscall (actually getppid)
testcase at http://ozlabs.org/~anton/junkcode/null_syscall.c
I tested with the following changes against the pseries_defconfig:
CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING=n
CONFIG_AUDIT=n
to remove the overhead of virtual CPU accounting and syscall
auditing.
POWER6:
baseline: mean = 757.2 cycles sd = 2.108
modified: mean = 759.1 cycles sd = 2.020
POWER7:
baseline: mean = 411.4 cycles sd = 0.138
modified: mean = 404.1 cycles sd = 0.109
So we have 1.77% improvement on POWER7 which looks significant. The
POWER6 suggest a 0.25% slowdown, but the results are within 1
standard deviation and may be in the noise.
Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
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