Re: [Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH 3/5] x86/pvclock: add vsyscall implementation

[Avi Kivity <avi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 10/29/2009 05:55 PM, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> > From: Avi Kivity [mailto:avi@xxxxxxxxxx]
> > Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2009 9:07 AM
> > To: Dan Magenheimer
> > Cc: Jeremy Fitzhardinge; Glauber Costa; Jeremy Fitzhardinge; Kurt
> > Hackel; the arch/x86 maintainers; Linux Kernel Mailing List;
> > Glauber de
> > Oliveira Costa; Xen-devel; Keir Fraser; Zach Brown; Chris Mason; Ingo
> > Molnar
> > Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Re: [PATCH 3/5] x86/pvclock: add vsyscall
> > implementation
> >
> >
> > On 10/29/2009 04:46 PM, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> >      
> > > No, the apps I'm familiar with (a DB and a JVM) need a timestamp
> > > not a monotonic counter.  The timestamps must be relatively
> > > accurate (e.g. we've been talking about gettimeofday generically,
> > > but these apps would use clock_gettime for nsec resolution),
> > > monotonically increasing, and work properly across a VM
> > > migration.  The timestamps are taken up to a 100K/sec or
> > > more so the apps need to ensure they are using the fastest
> > > mechanism available that meets those requirements.
> > >        
> > Out of interest, do you know (and can you relate) why those apps need
> > 100k/sec monotonically increasing timestamps?
> >      
> I don't have any public data available for this DB usage, but basically
> assume it is measuring transactions at a very high throughput, some
> of which are to a memory-resident portion of the DB.  Anecdotally,
> I'm told the difference between non-vsyscall gettimeofday
> and native rdtsc (on a machine with Invariant TSC support) can
> affect overall DB performance by as much as 10-20%.
>    
Sorry, that doesn't explain anything.

> I did find the following public link for the JVM:
>
> http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13188_01/jrockit/tools/intro/jmc3.html
>
> Search for "flight recorder".  This feature is intended to
> be enabled all the time, but with non-vsyscall gettimeofday
> the performance impact is unacceptably high, so they are using
> rdtscp instead (on those machines where it is available).  With
> rdtscp, the performance impact is not measureable.
>
> Though the processor/server vendors have finally fixed the
> "unsynced TSC" problem on recent x86 platforms, thus allowing
> enterprise software to obtain timestamps at rdtsc performance,
> the problem comes back all over again with virtualization
> because of migration.  Jeremy's vsyscall+pvclock is a great
> solution if the app can ensure that it is present; if not,
> the apps will instead continue to use rdtsc as even emulated
> rdtsc is 2-3x faster than non-vsyscall gettimeofday.
>
> Does that help?
>    
For profiling work fast timestamping is of course great, but surely 
there is no monotonicity requirement?
I don't think we'll be able to provide monotonicity with vsyscall on 
tsc-broken hosts, so we'll be limited to correcting the tsc frequency 
after migration for good-tsc hosts.
--
error compiling committee.c: too many arguments to function


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