The variable "vclocks_used" doesn't appear to be "read mostly".
Measurements of the access frequency with perf stat [1] and
perf report show, that approximately half of the accesses to
this variable are write accesses and happen in update_vsyscall()
in the file arch/x86/entry/vsyscall/vsyscall_gtod.c.
The measurements were done with the kernel 4.13.0-43-generic used by
ubuntu as well as with the stable kernel 4.16.7 with a custom config.
I've used "perf bench sched" and iperf3 as workloads.
This was discovered during my master thesis in the CADOS project [2].
[1] perf stat --all-cpus --group --event="{mem:addr/4:rw:k,mem:addr/4:w:k}"
[2] https://www.sra.uni-hannover.de/Research/CADOS/
Signed-off-by: Michael Rodin <michael-git@rodin.online>
---
arch/x86/entry/vsyscall/vsyscall_gtod.c | 2 +-
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/arch/x86/entry/vsyscall/vsyscall_gtod.c
b/arch/x86/entry/vsyscall/vsyscall_gtod.c
index e1216dd95c04..fc39f701fe4a 100644
--- a/arch/x86/entry/vsyscall/vsyscall_gtod.c
+++ b/arch/x86/entry/vsyscall/vsyscall_gtod.c
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
#include <asm/vgtod.h>
#include <asm/vvar.h>
-int vclocks_used __read_mostly;
+int vclocks_used;
DEFINE_VVAR(struct vsyscall_gtod_data, vsyscall_gtod_data);
--
2.14.1
