unicorn/qemu/include
Emilio G. Cota ae3e22a689
tb hash: hash phys_pc, pc, and flags with xxhash
For some workloads such as arm bootup, tb_phys_hash is performance-critical.
The is due to the high frequency of accesses to the hash table, originated
by (frequent) TLB flushes that wipe out the cpu-private tb_jmp_cache's.
More info:
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-03/msg05098.html

To dig further into this I modified an arm image booting debian jessie to
immediately shut down after boot. Analysis revealed that quite a bit of time
is unnecessarily spent in tb_phys_hash: the cause is poor hashing that
results in very uneven loading of chains in the hash table's buckets;
the longest observed chain had ~550 elements.

The appended addresses this with two changes:

1) Use xxhash as the hash table's hash function. xxhash is a fast,
high-quality hashing function.

2) Feed the hashing function with not just tb_phys, but also pc and flags.

This improves performance over using just tb_phys for hashing, since that
resulted in some hash buckets having many TB's, while others getting very few;
with these changes, the longest observed chain on a single hash bucket is
brought down from ~550 to ~40.

Tests show that the other element checked for in tb_find_physical,
cs_base, is always a match when tb_phys+pc+flags are a match,
so hashing cs_base is wasteful. It could be that this is an ARM-only
thing, though. UPDATE:
On Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 08:41:43 -0700, Richard Henderson wrote:
> The cs_base field is only used by i386 (in 16-bit modes), and sparc (for a TB
> consisting of only a delay slot).
> It may well still turn out to be reasonable to ignore cs_base for hashing.

BTW, after this change the hash table should not be called "tb_hash_phys"
anymore; this is addressed later in this series.

This change gives consistent bootup time improvements. I tested two
host machines:
- Intel Xeon E5-2690: 11.6% less time
- Intel i7-4790K: 19.2% less time

Increasing the number of hash buckets yields further improvements. However,
using a larger, fixed number of buckets can degrade performance for other
workloads that do not translate as many blocks (600K+ for debian-jessie arm
bootup). This is dealt with later in this series.

Backports commit 42bd32287f3a18d823f2258b813824a39ed7c6d9 from qemu
2018-02-24 18:00:14 -05:00
..
crypto Drop unused crypto source files 2018-02-17 15:23:57 -05:00
exec tb hash: hash phys_pc, pc, and flags with xxhash 2018-02-24 18:00:14 -05:00
fpu fpu: Remove use of int_fast16_t in conversions to int16 2018-02-20 16:54:04 -05:00
hw hw: clean up hw/hw.h includes 2018-02-24 02:46:41 -05:00
qapi qapi: Change visit_type_FOO() to no longer return partial objects 2018-02-23 19:53:17 -05:00
qemu compiler.h: add QEMU_ALIGNED() to enforce struct alignment 2018-02-24 17:32:43 -05:00
qom cpu: move exec-all.h inclusion out of cpu.h 2018-02-24 02:39:08 -05:00
sysemu accel: make configure_accelerator return void 2018-02-24 00:31:28 -05:00
config.h import 2015-08-21 15:04:50 +08:00
elf.h fix merge conflicts 2017-03-10 21:04:33 +08:00
glib_compat.h glib_compat: backport hashtable iterator interfaces 2018-02-21 13:18:44 -05:00
qemu-common.h qemu-common.h: Drop WORDS_ALIGNED define 2018-02-24 17:01:55 -05:00