• Ingo Molnar's avatar
    x86: set X86_FEATURE_TSC_RELIABLE · 83ce4009
    Ingo Molnar authored
    If the TSC is constant and non-stop, also set it reliable.
    
    (We will turn this off in DMI quirks for multi-chassis systems)
    
    The performance number on a 16-way Nehalem system running
    32 tasks that context-switch between each other is significant:
    
       sched_clock_stable=0		sched_clock_stable=1
       ....................         ....................
       22.456925 million/sec        24.306972 million/sec   [+8.2%]
    
    lmbench's "lat_ctx -s 0 2" goes from 0.63 microseconds to
    0.59 microseconds - a 6.7% increase in context-switching
    performance.
    
    Perfstat of 1 million pipe context switches between two tasks:
    
     Performance counter stats for './pipe-test-1m':
    
           [before]           [after]
       ............      ............
       37621.421089      36436.848378    task clock ticks     (msecs)
    
                  0                 0    CPU migrations       (events)
            2000274           2000189    context switches     (events)
                194               193    pagefaults           (events)
         8433799643        8171016416    CPU cycles           (events) -3.21%
         8370133368        8180999694    instructions         (events) -2.31%
            4158565           3895941    cache references     (events) -6.74%
              44312             46264    cache misses         (events)
    
        2349.287976       2279.362465    wall-time            (msecs)  -3.06%
    
    The speedup comes straight from the reduction in the instruction
    count. sched_clock_cpu() got simpler and the whole workload thus
    executes faster.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
    83ce4009
intel.c 11.1 KB