This patch changes the syscall handler to doom (tabort) active
transactions when a syscall is made and return very early without
performing the syscall and keeping side effects to a minimum (no CPU
accounting or system call tracing is performed). Also included is a
new HWCAP2 bit, PPC_FEATURE2_HTM_NOSC, to indicate this
behaviour to userspace.
Currently, the system call instruction automatically suspends an
active transaction which causes side effects to persist when an active
transaction fails.
This does change the kernel's behaviour, but in a way that was
documented as unsupported. It doesn't reduce functionality as
syscalls will still be performed after tsuspend; it just requires that
the transaction be explicitly suspended. It also provides a
consistent interface and makes the behaviour of user code
substantially the same across powerpc and platforms that do not
support suspended transactions (e.g. x86 and s390).
Performance measurements using
http://ozlabs.org/~anton/junkcode/null_syscall.c indicate the cost of
a normal (non-aborted) system call increases by about 0.25%.
Signed-off-by: Sam Bobroff <sam.bobroff@au1.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
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