Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932068AbWBMKfl (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Feb 2006 05:35:41 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932066AbWBMKfk (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Feb 2006 05:35:40 -0500 Received: from dsl027-180-168.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net ([216.27.180.168]:22238 "EHLO sunset.davemloft.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751745AbWBMKfR (ORCPT ); Mon, 13 Feb 2006 05:35:17 -0500 Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 02:34:30 -0800 (PST) Message-Id: <20060213.023430.126649129.davem@davemloft.net> To: heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com Cc: mingo@elte.hu, hare@suse.de, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: calibrate_migration_costs takes ages on s390 From: "David S. Miller" In-Reply-To: <20060213102634.GA4677@osiris.boeblingen.de.ibm.com> References: <20060213102634.GA4677@osiris.boeblingen.de.ibm.com> X-Mailer: Mew version 4.2.53 on Emacs 21.4 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1546 Lines: 31 From: Heiko Carstens Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 11:26:34 +0100 > The boot sequence on s390 sometimes takes ages and we spend a very long time > (up to one or two minutes) in calibrate_migration_costs. The time spent there > differs from boot to boot. Also the calculated costs differ a lot. I've seen > differences by up to a factor of 15 (yes, factor not percent). > Also I doubt that making these measurements make much sense on a completely > virtualized architecture where you cannot tell how much cpu time you will > get anyway. > Is there any workaround or fix available so we can avoid seeing this? Things are not as slow, but definitely slow on sparc64 too, and it's also due to the migration cost calculations. It's also really bad that it's using vmalloc(), for one thing, because this thrashes the TLB (some of us have 64-entry software replaced TLBs) and also because you can make no guarentees about how well the backing physical pages will distribute into the L2 cache. As a result, wildly different run-to-run results can be expected particularly for systems with 1-way or 2-way set assosciative L2 caches, which are common on sparc64. I don't know about s390. I think the migration cost calculator is way overboard and needs to be toned down a little bit. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/