In Linux 3.18 and below, GCC hoists the lsl instructions in the
pvclock code all the way to the beginning of __vdso_clock_gettime,
slowing the non-paravirt case significantly. For unknown reasons,
presumably related to the removal of a branch, the performance issue
is gone as of
e76b027e6408 x86,vdso: Use LSL unconditionally for vgetcpu
but I don't trust GCC enough to expect the problem to stay fixed.
There should be no correctness issue, because the __getcpu calls in
__vdso_vlock_gettime were never necessary in the first place.
Note to stable maintainers: In 3.18 and below, depending on
configuration, gcc 4.9.2 generates code like this:
9c3: 44 0f 03 e8 lsl %ax,%r13d
9c7: 45 89 eb mov %r13d,%r11d
9ca: 0f 03 d8 lsl %ax,%ebx
This patch won't apply as is to any released kernel, but I'll send a
trivial backported version if needed.
Fixes:
51c19b4f5927 x86: vdso: pvclock gettime support
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 3.8+
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
/*
* Load per CPU data from GDT. LSL is faster than RDTSCP and
- * works on all CPUs.
+ * works on all CPUs. This is volatile so that it orders
+ * correctly wrt barrier() and to keep gcc from cleverly
+ * hoisting it out of the calling function.
*/
- asm("lsl %1,%0" : "=r" (p) : "r" (__PER_CPU_SEG));
+ asm volatile ("lsl %1,%0" : "=r" (p) : "r" (__PER_CPU_SEG));
return p;
}