Previous size thresholds were guessed from various user space benchmarks
using a kernel with and without the alternative uaccess option. This
is however not as precise as a kernel based test to measure the real
speed of each method.
This adds a simple test bench to show the time needed for each method.
With this, the optimal size treshold for the alternative implementation
can be determined with more confidence. It appears that the optimal
threshold for both copy_to_user and clear_user is around 64 bytes. This
is not a surprise knowing that the memcpy and memset implementations
need at least 64 bytes to achieve maximum throughput.
One might suggest that such test be used to determine the optimal
threshold at run time instead, but results are near enough to 64 on
tested targets concerned by this alternative copy_to_user implementation,
so adding some overhead associated with a variable threshold is probably
not worth it for now.
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@marvell.com>
Because the alternate copy_to_user implementation has a higher setup cost
than the standard implementation, the size of the memory area to copy
is tested and the standard implementation invoked instead when that size
is too small. Still, that test is made after the processor has preserved
a bunch of registers on the stack which have to be reloaded right away
needlessly in that case, causing a measurable performance regression
compared to plain usage of the standard implementation only.
To make the size test overhead negligible, let's factorize it out of
the alternate copy_to_user function where it is clear to the compiler
that no stack frame is needed. Thanks to CONFIG_ARM_UNWIND allowing
for frame pointers to be disabled and tail call optimization to kick in,
the overhead in the small copy case becomes only 3 assembly instructions.
A similar trick is applied to clear_user as well.
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@marvell.com>
This implements {copy_to,clear}_user() by faulting in the userland
pages and then using the regular kernel mem{cpy,set}() to copy the
data (while holding the page table lock). This is a win if the regular
mem{cpy,set}() implementations are faster than the user copy functions,
which is the case e.g. on Feroceon, where 8-word STMs (which memcpy()
uses under the right conditions) give significantly higher memory write
throughput than a sequence of individual 32bit stores.
Here are numbers for page sized buffers on some Feroceon cores:
- copy_to_user on Orion5x goes from 51 MB/s to 83 MB/s
- clear_user on Orion5x goes from 89MB/s to 314MB/s
- copy_to_user on Kirkwood goes from 240 MB/s to 356 MB/s
- clear_user on Kirkwood goes from 367 MB/s to 1108 MB/s
- copy_to_user on Disco-Duo goes from 248 MB/s to 398 MB/s
- clear_user on Disco-Duo goes from 328 MB/s to 1741 MB/s
Because the setup cost is non negligible, this is worthwhile only if
the amount of data to copy is large enough. The operation falls back
to the standard implementation when the amount of data is below a certain
threshold. This threshold was determined empirically, however some targets
could benefit from a lower runtime determined value for optimal results
eventually.
In the copy_from_user() case, this technique does not provide any
worthwhile performance gain due to the fact that any kind of read access
allocates the cache and subsequent 32bit loads are just as fast as the
equivalent 8-word LDM.
Signed-off-by: Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh@marvell.com>
Signed-off-by: Nicolas Pitre <nico@marvell.com>
Tested-by: Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>
Nicolas Pitre
Lennert Buytenhek