jeffr_tech ([info]jeffr_tech) wrote,
@ 2008-03-12 19:22:00
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I have an opteron with older slower memory that I reproduced the pipe tests on to see if it was any different on a 64bit system. I'm not going to paste the full results but here's a couple of data points:

linux-2.6.24
64[writer]: 97.235 wall (2.031 usr, 68.674 sys), 10.531 Mb/sec
1024[writer]: 13.300 wall (0.145 usr, 9.039 sys), 76.991 Mb/sec
65536[writer]: 3.068 wall (0.001 usr, 1.718 sys), 333.766 Mb/sec

FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT undermydesk (no cpu switch patches though)
64[writer]: 53.163 wall (1.057 usr, 42.083 sys), 19.261 Mb/sec
1024[writer]: 5.325 wall (0.118 usr, 4.146 sys), 192.284 Mb/sec
65536[writer]: 0.567 wall (0.000 usr, 0.130 sys), 1805.509 Mb/sec

So on this machine we start of 2x as fast and end up 5.5x as fast. The numbers pretty much follow a curve through those points. This verifies the data taken from the old 32bit HTT machine they tested on. I don't intend to post configs and so on as the original lkml thread is plenty rigorous enough.

I forgot to mention earlier. The FreeBSD Alan Cox has committed super-pages! We're seeing some great gains from that. This allows the kernel to automatically use large TLBs for conforming regions of memory. It has a component that ensures that large, contiguous, chunks of physical memory will be available to support this. There is also a defragmenting/compacting piece. There's some great work going into FreeBSD 8.0 already!



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[info]jeffr_tech
2008-03-13 08:23 am UTC (link)
Yes, that's the tlb. It caches virtual to physical mappings for the processor. Most modern processors have multiple sizes of entries but the pages obviously have to be physically and virtually contiguous. There are very few TLBs relative to the size of memory so it's a highly contested resource. If you have a TLB miss it can turn into several cache misses as well as you walk the page tables to discover the real physical address.

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