Am 14.09.2013 um 00:24 schrieb Paul Mackerras <pau...@samba.org>:

> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 06:01:37PM -0500, Alexander Graf wrote:
>> 
>> On 05.08.2013, at 23:27, Paul Mackerras wrote:
>> 
>>> Currently we request write access to all pages that get mapped into the
>>> guest, even if the guest is only loading from the page.  This reduces
>>> the effectiveness of KSM because it means that we unshare every page we
>>> access.  Also, we always set the changed (C) bit in the guest HPTE if
>>> it allows writing, even for a guest load.
>> 
>> Have you measured how much performance we lose by mapping it twice? Usually 
>> Linux will mark user pages that are not written to yet as non-writable, no? 
>> That's why I assumed that "may_write" is the same as "guest wants to write" 
>> back when I wrote this.
>> 
>> I'm also afraid that a sequence like
>> 
>>  ld x,y
>>  std x,y
>> 
>> in the kernel will trap twice and slow us down heavily. But maybe I'm just 
>> being paranoid. Can you please measure bootup time with and without this, as 
>> well as a fork bomb (spawn /bin/echo 1000 times and time it) with and 
>> without so we get a feeling for its impact?
> 
> Bootup (F19 guest, 3 runs):
> 
> Without the patch: average 20.12 seconds, st. dev. 0.17 seconds
> With the patch: 20.47 seconds, st. dev. 0.19 seconds
> 
> Delta: 0.35 seconds, or 1.7%.
> 
> time for i in $(seq 1000); do /bin/echo $i >/dev/null; done:
> 
> Without the patch: average 7.27 seconds, st. dev. 0.23 seconds
> With the patch: average 7.55 seconds, st. dev. 0.39 seconds
> 
> Delta: 0.28 seconds, or 3.8%.
> 
> So there appears to be a small effect, of a few percent.

So in the normal case it slows us down, but allows ksm to be effective. Do we 
actually want this change then?

Alex

> 
> Paul.
> 
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