Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756141AbZFIOz0 (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Jun 2009 10:55:26 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1754744AbZFIOzP (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Jun 2009 10:55:15 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:47148 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751181AbZFIOzO (ORCPT ); Tue, 9 Jun 2009 10:55:14 -0400 Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2009 07:54:00 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds X-X-Sender: torvalds@localhost.localdomain To: Nick Piggin cc: Rusty Russell , Ingo Molnar , Jeremy Fitzhardinge , "H. Peter Anvin" , Thomas Gleixner , Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andrew Morton , Peter Zijlstra , Avi Kivity , Arjan van de Ven Subject: Re: [benchmark] 1% performance overhead of paravirt_ops on native kernels In-Reply-To: <20090609093918.GC16940@wotan.suse.de> Message-ID: References: <4A0B62F7.5030802@goop.org> <200906032208.28061.rusty@rustcorp.com.au> <200906041554.37102.rusty@rustcorp.com.au> <20090609093918.GC16940@wotan.suse.de> User-Agent: Alpine 2.01 (LFD 1184 2008-12-16) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1838 Lines: 41 On Tue, 9 Jun 2009, Nick Piggin wrote: > > > > And don't get me wrong - I don't like HIGHMEM. I detest the damn thing. I > > hated having to merge it, and I still hate it. It's a stupid, ugly, and > > very invasive config option. It's just that it's there to support a > > stupid, ugly and very annoying fundamental hardware problem. > > I was looking forward to be able to get rid of it... unfortunately > other 32-bit architectures are starting to use it again :( .. and 32-bit x86 is still not dead, and there are still people who use it with more than 1G of RAM (ie it's not like it's just purely a "small embedded cell-phones with Atom" kind of thing that Intel seems to be pushing for eventually). > I guess it is not incredibly intrusive for generic mm code. A bit > of kmap sprinkled around which is actually quite a useful delimiter > of where pagecache is addressed via its kernel mapping. > > Do you hate more the x86 code? Maybe that can be removed? No, we can't remove the x86 code, and quite frankly, I don't even mind that. The part I mind is actually the sprinkling of kmap all over. Do a "git grep kmap fs", and you'll see that there are four times as many kmap's in filesystem code than there are in mm/. I was benchmarking btrfs on my little EeePC. There, kmap overhead was 25% of file access time. Part of it is that people have been taught to use "kmap_atomic()", which is usable under spinlocks and people have been told that it's "fast". It's not fast. The whole TLB thing is slow as hell. Oh well. It's sad. But we can't get rid of it. Linus -- 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/