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Ricardo Neri fd329f276e x86/mtrr: Skip cache flushes on CPUs with cache self-snooping
Programming MTRR registers in multi-processor systems is a rather lengthy
process. Furthermore, all processors must program these registers in lock
step and with interrupts disabled; the process also involves flushing
caches and TLBs twice. As a result, the process may take a considerable
amount of time.

On some platforms, this can lead to a large skew of the refined-jiffies
clock source. Early when booting, if no other clock is available (e.g.,
booting with hpet=disabled), the refined-jiffies clock source is used to
monitor the TSC clock source. If the skew of refined-jiffies is too large,
Linux wrongly assumes that the TSC is unstable:

  clocksource: timekeeping watchdog on CPU1: Marking clocksource
               'tsc-early' as unstable because the skew is too large:
  clocksource: 'refined-jiffies' wd_now: fffedc10 wd_last:
               fffedb90 mask: ffffffff
  clocksource: 'tsc-early' cs_now: 5eccfddebc cs_last: 5e7e3303d4
               mask: ffffffffffffffff
  tsc: Marking TSC unstable due to clocksource watchdog

As per measurements, around 98% of the time needed by the procedure to
program MTRRs in multi-processor systems is spent flushing caches with
wbinvd(). As per the Section 11.11.8 of the Intel 64 and IA 32
Architectures Software Developer's Manual, it is not necessary to flush
caches if the CPU supports cache self-snooping. Thus, skipping the cache
flushes can reduce by several tens of milliseconds the time needed to
complete the programming of the MTRR registers:

Platform                      	Before	   After
104-core (208 Threads) Skylake  1437ms      28ms
  2-core (  4 Threads) Haswell   114ms       2ms

Reported-by: Mohammad Etemadi <mohammad.etemadi@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Ricardo Neri <ricardo.neri-calderon@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Borislav Petkov <bp@suse.de>
Cc: Alan Cox <alan.cox@intel.com>
Cc: Tony Luck <tony.luck@intel.com>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <andi.kleen@intel.com>
Cc: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Jordan Borgner <mail@jordan-borgner.de>
Cc: "Ravi V. Shankar" <ravi.v.shankar@intel.com>
Cc: Ricardo Neri <ricardo.neri@intel.com>
Cc: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@intel.com>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Peter Feiner <pfeiner@google.com>
Cc: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/1561689337-19390-3-git-send-email-ricardo.neri-calderon@linux.intel.com
2019-06-28 07:21:00 +02:00
Documentation Documentation/ABI: Document umwait control sysfs interfaces 2019-06-24 01:44:35 +02:00
LICENSES LICENSES: Rename other to deprecated 2019-05-03 06:34:32 -06:00
arch x86/mtrr: Skip cache flushes on CPUs with cache self-snooping 2019-06-28 07:21:00 +02:00
block block, bfq: add weight symlink to the bfq.weight cgroup parameter 2019-06-07 01:29:40 -06:00
certs treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 36 2019-05-24 17:27:11 +02:00
crypto SPDX update for 5.2-rc4 2019-06-08 12:52:42 -07:00
drivers ACPI, x86: Add Zhaoxin processors support for NONSTOP TSC 2019-06-22 11:45:57 +02:00
fs A change to call iput() asynchronously to avoid a possible deadlock 2019-06-08 15:57:35 -07:00
include SPDX update for 5.2-rc4 2019-06-08 12:52:42 -07:00
init Char/Misc driver fixes for 5.2-rc4 2019-06-08 12:50:36 -07:00
ipc treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 441 2019-06-05 17:37:17 +02:00
kernel SPDX update for 5.2-rc4 2019-06-08 12:52:42 -07:00
lib SPDX update for 5.2-rc4 2019-06-08 12:52:42 -07:00
mm treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 441 2019-06-05 17:37:17 +02:00
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scripts SPDX update for 5.2-rc4 2019-06-08 12:52:42 -07:00
security treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 441 2019-06-05 17:37:17 +02:00
sound treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 441 2019-06-05 17:37:17 +02:00
tools selftests/x86/fsgsbase: Test ptracer-induced GSBASE write with FSGSBASE 2019-06-22 11:38:56 +02:00
usr user/Makefile: Fix typo and capitalization in comment section 2018-12-11 00:18:03 +09:00
virt treewide: Replace GPLv2 boilerplate/reference with SPDX - rule 333 2019-06-05 17:37:06 +02:00
.clang-format Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2019-04-17 11:26:25 -07:00
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.mailmap A reasonably busy cycle for docs, including: 2019-05-08 12:42:50 -07:00
COPYING COPYING: use the new text with points to the license files 2018-03-23 12:41:45 -06:00
CREDITS MAINTAINERS: Farewell Martin Schwidefsky 2019-05-31 10:14:11 +02:00
Kbuild Kbuild updates for v5.1 2019-03-10 17:48:21 -07:00
Kconfig kconfig: move the "Executable file formats" menu to fs/Kconfig.binfmt 2018-08-02 08:06:55 +09:00
MAINTAINERS x86/cpu: Create Zhaoxin processors architecture support file 2019-06-22 11:45:57 +02:00
Makefile Linux 5.2-rc4 2019-06-08 20:24:46 -07:00
README Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/ 2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00

README

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.