This is a prerequisite for supporting multiple TCG contexts, since
we will have threads generating code in separate regions of
code_gen_buffer.
For this we need a new field (.size) in struct tb_tc to keep
track of the size of the translated code. This field uses a size_t
to avoid adding a hole to the struct, although really an unsigned
int would have been enough.
The comparison function we use is optimized for the common case:
insertions. Profiling shows that upon booting debian-arm, 98%
of comparisons are between existing tb's (i.e. a->size and b->size
are both !0), which happens during insertions (and removals, but
those are rare). The remaining cases are lookups. From reading the glib
sources we see that the first key is always the lookup key. However,
the code does not assume this to always be the case because this
behaviour is not guaranteed in the glib docs. However, we embed
this knowledge in the code as a branch hint for the compiler.
Note that tb_free does not free space in the code_gen_buffer anymore,
since we cannot easily know whether the tb is the last one inserted
in code_gen_buffer. The next patch in this series renames tb_free
to tb_remove to reflect this.
Performance-wise, lookups in tb_find_pc are the same as before:
O(log n). However, insertions are O(log n) instead of O(1), which
results in a small slowdown when booting debian-arm:
Performance counter stats for 'build/arm-softmmu/qemu-system-arm \
-machine type=virt -nographic -smp 1 -m 4096 \
-netdev user,id=unet,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
-device virtio-net-device,netdev=unet \
-drive file=img/arm/jessie-arm32.qcow2,id=myblock,index=0,if=none \
-device virtio-blk-device,drive=myblock \
-kernel img/arm/aarch32-current-linux-kernel-only.img \
-append console=ttyAMA0 root=/dev/vda1 \
-name arm,debug-threads=on -smp 1' (10 runs):
- Before:
8048.598422 task-clock (msec) # 0.931 CPUs utilized ( +- 0.28% )
16,974 context-switches # 0.002 M/sec ( +- 0.12% )
0 cpu-migrations # 0.000 K/sec
10,125 page-faults # 0.001 M/sec ( +- 1.23% )
35,144,901,879 cycles # 4.367 GHz ( +- 0.14% )
<not supported> stalled-cycles-frontend
<not supported> stalled-cycles-backend
65,758,252,643 instructions # 1.87 insns per cycle ( +- 0.33% )
10,871,298,668 branches # 1350.707 M/sec ( +- 0.41% )
192,322,212 branch-misses # 1.77% of all branches ( +- 0.32% )
8.640869419 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.57% )
- After:
8146.242027 task-clock (msec) # 0.923 CPUs utilized ( +- 1.23% )
17,016 context-switches # 0.002 M/sec ( +- 0.40% )
0 cpu-migrations # 0.000 K/sec
18,769 page-faults # 0.002 M/sec ( +- 0.45% )
35,660,956,120 cycles # 4.378 GHz ( +- 1.22% )
<not supported> stalled-cycles-frontend
<not supported> stalled-cycles-backend
65,095,366,607 instructions # 1.83 insns per cycle ( +- 1.73% )
10,803,480,261 branches # 1326.192 M/sec ( +- 1.95% )
195,601,289 branch-misses # 1.81% of all branches ( +- 0.39% )
8.828660235 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.38% )
Backports commit 2ac01d6dafabd4a726254eea98824c798d416ee4 from qemu
Having a fixed-size hash table for keeping track of all translation blocks
is suboptimal: some workloads are just too big or too small to get maximum
performance from the hash table. The MRU promotion policy helps improve
performance when the hash table is a little undersized, but it cannot
make up for severely undersized hash tables.
Furthermore, frequent MRU promotions result in writes that are a scalability
bottleneck. For scalability, lookups should only perform reads, not writes.
This is not a big deal for now, but it will become one once MTTCG matures.
The appended fixes these issues by using qht as the implementation of
the TB hash table. This solution is superior to other alternatives considered,
namely:
- master: implementation in QEMU before this patchset
- xxhash: before this patch, i.e. fixed buckets + xxhash hashing + MRU.
- xxhash-rcu: fixed buckets + xxhash + RCU list + MRU.
MRU is implemented here by adding an intermediate struct
that contains the u32 hash and a pointer to the TB; this
allows us, on an MRU promotion, to copy said struct (that is not
at the head), and put this new copy at the head. After a grace
period, the original non-head struct can be eliminated, and
after another grace period, freed.
- qht-fixed-nomru: fixed buckets + xxhash + qht without auto-resize +
no MRU for lookups; MRU for inserts.
The appended solution is the following:
- qht-dyn-nomru: dynamic number of buckets + xxhash + qht w/ auto-resize +
no MRU for lookups; MRU for inserts.
The plots below compare the considered solutions. The Y axis shows the
boot time (in seconds) of a debian jessie image with arm-softmmu; the X axis
sweeps the number of buckets (or initial number of buckets for qht-autoresize).
The plots in PNG format (and with errorbars) can be seen here:
http://imgur.com/a/Awgnq
Each test runs 5 times, and the entire QEMU process is pinned to a
single core for repeatability of results.
Host: Intel Xeon E5-2690
28 ++------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+------------++
A***** + + + master **A*** +
27 ++ * xxhash ##B###++
| A******A****** xxhash-rcu $$C$$$ |
26 C$$ A******A****** qht-fixed-nomru*%%D%%%++
D%%$$ A******A******A*qht-dyn-mru A*E****A
25 ++ %%$$ qht-dyn-nomru &&F&&&++
B#####% |
24 ++ #C$$$$$ ++
| B### $ |
| ## C$$$$$$ |
23 ++ # C$$$$$$ ++
| B###### C$$$$$$ %%%D
22 ++ %B###### C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C
| D%%%%%%B###### @E@@@@@@ %%%D%%%@@@E@@@@@@E
21 E@@@@@@E@@@@@@F&&&@@@E@@@&&&D%%%%%%B######B######B######B######B######B
+ E@@@ F&&& + E@ + F&&& + +
20 ++------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+------------++
14 16 18 20 22 24
log2 number of buckets
Host: Intel i7-4790K
14.5 ++------------+------------+-------------+------------+------------++
A** + + + master **A*** +
14 ++ ** xxhash ##B###++
13.5 ++ ** xxhash-rcu $$C$$$++
| qht-fixed-nomru %%D%%% |
13 ++ A****** qht-dyn-mru @@E@@@++
| A*****A******A****** qht-dyn-nomru &&F&&& |
12.5 C$$ A******A******A*****A****** ***A
12 ++ $$ A*** ++
D%%% $$ |
11.5 ++ %% ++
B### %C$$$$$$ |
11 ++ ## D%%%%% C$$$$$ ++
| # % C$$$$$$ |
10.5 F&&&&&&B######D%%%%% C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$C$$$$$$ $$$C
10 E@@@@@@E@@@@@@B#####B######B######E@@@@@@E@@@%%%D%%%%%D%%%###B######B
+ F&& D%%%%%%B######B######B#####B###@@@D%%% +
9.5 ++------------+------------+-------------+------------+------------++
14 16 18 20 22 24
log2 number of buckets
Note that the original point before this patch series is X=15 for "master";
the little sensitivity to the increased number of buckets is due to the
poor hashing function in master.
xxhash-rcu has significant overhead due to the constant churn of allocating
and deallocating intermediate structs for implementing MRU. An alternative
would be do consider failed lookups as "maybe not there", and then
acquire the external lock (tb_lock in this case) to really confirm that
there was indeed a failed lookup. This, however, would not be enough
to implement dynamic resizing--this is more complex: see
"Resizable, Scalable, Concurrent Hash Tables via Relativistic
Programming" by Triplett, McKenney and Walpole. This solution was
discarded due to the very coarse RCU read critical sections that we have
in MTTCG; resizing requires waiting for readers after every pointer update,
and resizes require many pointer updates, so this would quickly become
prohibitive.
qht-fixed-nomru shows that MRU promotion is advisable for undersized
hash tables.
However, qht-dyn-mru shows that MRU promotion is not important if the
hash table is properly sized: there is virtually no difference in
performance between qht-dyn-nomru and qht-dyn-mru.
Before this patch, we're at X=15 on "xxhash"; after this patch, we're at
X=15 @ qht-dyn-nomru. This patch thus matches the best performance that we
can achieve with optimum sizing of the hash table, while keeping the hash
table scalable for readers.
The improvement we get before and after this patch for booting debian jessie
with arm-softmmu is:
- Intel Xeon E5-2690: 10.5% less time
- Intel i7-4790K: 5.2% less time
We could get this same improvement _for this particular workload_ by
statically increasing the size of the hash table. But this would hurt
workloads that do not need a large hash table. The dynamic (upward)
resizing allows us to start small and enlarge the hash table as needed.
A quick note on downsizing: the table is resized back to 2**15 buckets
on every tb_flush; this makes sense because it is not guaranteed that the
table will reach the same number of TBs later on (e.g. most bootup code is
thrown away after boot); it makes sense to grow the hash table as
more code blocks are translated. This also avoids the complication of
having to build downsizing hysteresis logic into qht.
Backports commit 909eaac9bbc2ed4f3a82ce38e905b87d478a3e00 from qemu
Allocating an arbitrarily-sized array of tbs results in either
(a) a lot of memory wasted or (b) unnecessary flushes of the code
cache when we run out of TB structs in the array.
An obvious solution would be to just malloc a TB struct when needed,
and keep the TB array as an array of pointers (recall that tb_find_pc()
needs the TB array to run in O(log n)).
Perhaps a better solution, which is implemented in this patch, is to
allocate TB's right before the translated code they describe. This
results in some memory waste due to padding to have code and TBs in
separate cache lines--for instance, I measured 4.7% of padding in the
used portion of code_gen_buffer when booting aarch64 Linux on a
host with 64-byte cache lines. However, it can allow for optimizations
in some host architectures, since TCG backends could safely assume that
the TB and the corresponding translated code are very close to each
other in memory. See this message by rth for a detailed explanation:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-03/msg05172.html
Subject: Re: GSoC 2017 Proposal: TCG performance enhancements
Backports commit 6e3b2bfd6af488a896f7936e99ef160f8f37e6f2 from qemu
TCG backends do not need most of exec-all.h; extract what they actually
need to a separate file or move it directly to tcg.h. The next patch
will stop including exec-all.h from everywhere.
Backports commit 00f6da6a1a5d1ce085334eccbb50ec899ceed513 from qemu
