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
This shares an cached empty FlatView among address spaces. The empty
FV is used every time when a root MR renders into a FV without memory
sections which happens when MR or its children are not enabled or
zero-sized. The empty_view is not NULL to keep the rest of memory
API intact; it also has a dispatch tree for the same reason.
On POWER8 with 255 CPUs, 255 virtio-net, 40 PCI bridges guest this halves
the amount of FlatView's in use (557 -> 260) and dispatch tables
(~800000 -> ~370000). In an unrelated experiment with 112 non-virtio
devices on x86 ("-M pc"), only 4 FlatViews are alive, and about ~2000
are created at startup.
Backports commit 092aa2fc65b7a35121616aad8f39d47b8f921618 from qemu
This allows sharing flat views between address spaces (AS) when
the same root memory region is used when creating a new address space.
This is done by walking through all ASes and caching one FlatView per
a physical root MR (i.e. not aliased).
This removes search for duplicates from address_space_init_shareable() as
FlatViews are shared elsewhere and keeping as::ref_count correct seems
an unnecessary and useless complication.
This should cause no change and memory use or boot time yet.
Backports commit 967dc9b1194a9281124b2e1ce67b6c3359a2138f from qemu
As we are going to share FlatView's between AddressSpace's,
and AddressSpaceDispatch is a structure to perform quick lookup
in FlatView, this moves ASD to FlatView.
After previosly open coded ASD rendering, we can also remove
as->next_dispatch as the new FlatView pointer is stored
on a stack and set to an AS atomically.
flatview_destroy() is executed under RCU instead of
address_space_dispatch_free() now.
This makes mem_begin/mem_commit to work with ASD and mem_add with FV
as later on mem_add will be taking FV as an argument anyway.
This should cause no behavioural change.
Backports commit 66a6df1dc6d5b28cc3e65db0d71683fbdddc6b62 from qemu
Add a MemoryRegion property, which if set is used to construct
the CPU's initial (default) AddressSpace.
Backports commit 6731d864f80938e404dc3e5eb7f6b76b891e3e43 from qemu
ARM and probably the rest of the arches have significant memory leaks as
they have no release interface.
Additionally, DrMemory does not have 64-bit support and thus I can't
test the 64-bit version under Windows. Under Linux valgrind supports
both 32-bit and 64-bit but there are different macros and code for Linux
and Windows.
