On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 01:37:58PM +1000, Bruce Evans wrote: > On Sat, 22 Jun 2013, I wrote: > > > ... > > Here are considerably expanded tests, with noninline tests dropped. > > Summary of times on Athlon64: > > > > simple increment: 4-7 cycles (1) > > simple increment preceded by feature test: 5-8 cycles (1) > > simple 32-bit increment: 4-7 cycles (2) > > correct 32-bit increment (addl to mem): 5.5-7 cycles (3) > > inlined critical section: 8.5 cycles (4) > > better inlined critical section: 7 cycles (5) > > correct unsigned 32-bit inc of 64-bit counter: 4-7 cycles (6) > > "improve" previous to allow immediate operand: 5+ cycles > > correct signed 32-bit inc of 64-bit counter: 8.5-9 cycles (7) > > correct 64-bit inc of 64-bit counter: 8-9 cycles (8) > > -current method (cmpxchg8b): 18 cycles > > corei7 (freefall) has about the same timing as Athlon64, but core2 > (ref10-i386) is 3-4 cycles slower for the tests that use cmpxchg. You only tested 32 bit, right ? Note that core2-class machines have at least one cycle penalty for decoding any instruction with REX prefix.
>
> > (4) The critical section method is quite fast when inlined.
> > (5) The critical section method is even faster when optimized. This is
> > what should be used if you don't want the complications for the
> > daemon.
>
> Oops, I forgot that critical sections are much slower in -current than
> in my version. They probably take 20-40 cycles for the best case, and
> can't easily be tested in userland since they disable interrupts in
> hardware. My versions disable interrupts in software.
The critical sections do not disable the interrupts. Only the thread
local counter is incremented. Leaving the section could be complicated
though.
>
> > ...
> > % % static inline void
> > % alt_counter_u64_add(counter_u64_t c, int64_t inc)
> > % {
> > % #if 1
> > % /* 8.5 cycles on A64. */
> > % td->td_critnest++;
> > % __asm __volatile("addl %1,%%ds:%0" : "=m,m" (*c) : "?i,r" (inc));
> > % td->td_critnest++;
>
> Oops, one increment should be a decrement.
>
> > % #elif 1
> > % /* 7 cycles on A64. */
> > % uint32_t ocritnest;
> > %
> > % ocritnest = td->td_critnest;
> > % td->td_critnest = ocritnest + 1;
> > % __asm __volatile("addl %1,%%ds:%0" : "=m,m" (*c) : "?i,r" (inc));
> > % td->td_critnest = ocritnest;
> > % #elif 0
>
> Even in my version, I have to check for unmasked interrupts when td_critnest
> is reduced to 0. At least the test for being reduced to 0 can be very fast,
> since the reduced value is loaded early and can be tested early.
>
> Further tests confirm that incl and incq are pipelined normally on at
> least corei7 and core2. In the loop test, freefall can do 4 independent
> addq's to memory faster than it can do 1 :-). It can do 6 independent
> addq's to memory in the same time that it can do 1. After that, the
> loop overhead prevents geting the complete bandwidth of the memory
> system. However, 6 addq's to the same memory location take a little
> more than 6 times longer than 1. Multiple increments of the same counter
> one after the other are probably rare, but the counter API makes it harder
> to coaelsce them if they occur, and the implementation using independent
> asms ensures that the compiler cannot coalesce them.
I think that the naive looping on Core i7+ to measure the latencies
of the instructions simply does not work. The Nehalem hardware started
to provide the loop detector for the instruction queue inside the decoder,
which essentially makes the short loops executed from the microopcode
form. We never use counters in the tight loops.
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