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Date:   Wed, 8 Apr 2020 14:54:04 -0400 (EDT)
From:   Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
To:     Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
cc:     Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>, Borislav Petkov <bp@alien8.de>,
        "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>, X86 ML <x86@kernel.org>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        device-mapper development <dm-devel@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] memcpy_flushcache: use cache flusing for larger
 lengths
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On Tue, 7 Apr 2020, Dan Williams wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 8:02 AM Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > [ resending this to x86 maintainers ]
> >
> > Hi
> >
> > I tested performance of various methods how to write to optane-based
> > persistent memory, and found out that non-temporal stores achieve
> > throughput 1.3 GB/s. 8 cached stores immediatelly followed by clflushopt
> > or clwb achieve throughput 1.6 GB/s.
> >
> > memcpy_flushcache uses non-temporal stores, I modified it to use cached
> > stores + clflushopt and it improved performance of the dm-writecache
> > target significantly:
> >
> > dm-writecache throughput:
> > (dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/wc bs=64k oflag=direct)
> > writecache block size   512             1024            2048            4096
> > movnti                  496 MB/s        642 MB/s        725 MB/s        744 MB/s
> > clflushopt              373 MB/s        688 MB/s        1.1 GB/s        1.2 GB/s
> >
> > For block size 512, movnti works better, for larger block sizes,
> > clflushopt is better.
> 
> This should use clwb instead of clflushopt, the clwb macri
> automatically converts back to clflushopt if clwb is not supported.

But we want to invalidate cache, we do not expect CPU to access these data
anymore (it will be accessed by a DMA engine during writeback).

> > I was also testing the novafs filesystem, it is not upstream, but it
> > benefitted from similar change in __memcpy_flushcache and
> > __copy_user_nocache:
> > write throughput on big files - movnti: 662 MB/s, clwb: 1323 MB/s
> > write throughput on small files - movnti: 621 MB/s, clwb: 1013 MB/s
> >
> >
> > I submit this patch for __memcpy_flushcache that improves dm-writecache
> > performance.
> >
> > Other ideas - should we introduce memcpy_to_pmem instead of modifying
> > memcpy_flushcache and move this logic there? Or should I modify the
> > dm-writecache target directly to use clflushopt with no change to the
> > architecture-specific code?
> 
> This also needs to mention your analysis that showed that this can
> have negative cache pollution effects [1], so I'm not sure how to
> decide when to make the tradeoff. Once we have movdir64b the tradeoff
> equation changes yet again:
> 
> [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nvdimm/alpine.LRH.2.02.2004010941310.23210@file01.intranet.prod.int.rdu2.redhat.com/

I analyzed it some more. I have created this program that tests writecache 
w.r.t. cache pollution:

http://people.redhat.com/~mpatocka/testcases/pmem/misc/l1-test-2.c

It fills the cache with a chain of random pointers and then walks these 
pointers to evaluate cache pollution. Between the walks, it writes data to 
the dm-writecache target.

With the original kernel, the result is:
8503 - 11366
real    0m7.985s
user    0m0.585s
sys     0m7.390s

With dm-writecache hacked to use cached writes + clflushopt:
8513 - 11379
real    0m5.045s
user    0m0.670s
sys     0m4.365s

So, the hacked dm-writecache is significantly faster, while the cache 
micro-benchmark doesn't show any more cache pollution.

That's for dm-writecache. Are there some other significant users of 
memcpy_flushcache that need to be checked?

Mikulas