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authorSteven Rostedt <srostedt@redhat.com>2010-02-25 08:42:06 -0500
committerSteven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>2010-02-25 08:42:06 -0500
commit0c54dd341fb701928b8e5dca91ced1870c55b05b (patch)
tree0ace2d4852e45058511b2760afd168042e8b2267 /include/trace
parent83f0d53993b2967e54186468b0fc4321447f68f1 (diff)
ftrace: Remove memory barriers from NMI code when not needed
The code in stop_machine that modifies the kernel text has a bit of logic to handle the case of NMIs. stop_machine does not prevent NMIs from executing, and if an NMI were to trigger on another CPU as the modifying CPU is changing the NMI text, a GPF could result. To prevent the GPF, the NMI calls ftrace_nmi_enter() which may modify the code first, then any other NMIs will just change the text to the same content which will do no harm. The code that stop_machine called must wait for NMIs to finish while it changes each location in the kernel. That code may also change the text to what the NMI changed it to. The key is that the text will never change content while another CPU is executing it. To make the above work, the call to ftrace_nmi_enter() must also do a smp_mb() as well as atomic_inc(). But for applications like perf that require a high number of NMIs for profiling, this can have a dramatic effect on the system. Not only is it doing a full memory barrier on both nmi_enter() as well as nmi_exit() it is also modifying a global variable with an atomic operation. This kills performance on large SMP machines. Since the memory barriers are only needed when ftrace is in the process of modifying the text (which is seldom), this patch adds a "modifying_code" variable that gets set before stop machine is executed and cleared afterwards. The NMIs will check this variable and store it in a per CPU "save_modifying_code" variable that it will use to check if it needs to do the memory barriers and atomic dec on NMI exit. Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'include/trace')
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