From ea7145477a461e09d8d194cac4b996dc4f449107 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jiri Olsa Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2011 19:10:39 +0100 Subject: x86: Separate out entry text section Put x86 entry code into a separate link section: .entry.text. Separating the entry text section seems to have performance benefits - caused by more efficient instruction cache usage. Running hackbench with perf stat --repeat showed that the change compresses the icache footprint. The icache load miss rate went down by about 15%: before patch: 19417627 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.147% ) after patch: 16490788 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.180% ) The motivation of the patch was to fix a particular kprobes bug that relates to the entry text section, the performance advantage was discovered accidentally. Whole perf output follows: - results for current tip tree: Performance counter stats for './hackbench/hackbench 10' (500 runs): 19417627 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.147% ) 2676914223 instructions # 0.497 IPC ( +- 0.079% ) 5389516026 cycles ( +- 0.144% ) 0.206267711 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.138% ) - results for current tip tree with the patch applied: Performance counter stats for './hackbench/hackbench 10' (500 runs): 16490788 L1-icache-load-misses ( +- 0.180% ) 2717734941 instructions # 0.502 IPC ( +- 0.079% ) 5414756975 cycles ( +- 0.148% ) 0.206747566 seconds time elapsed ( +- 0.137% ) Signed-off-by: Jiri Olsa Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo Cc: Frederic Weisbecker Cc: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: Andrew Morton Cc: Nick Piggin Cc: Eric Dumazet Cc: masami.hiramatsu.pt@hitachi.com Cc: ananth@in.ibm.com Cc: davem@davemloft.net Cc: 2nddept-manager@sdl.hitachi.co.jp LKML-Reference: <20110307181039.GB15197@jolsa.redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar --- arch/x86/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) (limited to 'arch/x86/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S') diff --git a/arch/x86/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S b/arch/x86/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S index bf470075518..6d4341d5c52 100644 --- a/arch/x86/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S +++ b/arch/x86/kernel/vmlinux.lds.S @@ -105,6 +105,7 @@ SECTIONS SCHED_TEXT LOCK_TEXT KPROBES_TEXT + ENTRY_TEXT IRQENTRY_TEXT *(.fixup) *(.gnu.warning) -- cgit v1.2.3-70-g09d2