Commit 17156044 authored by Changbin Du's avatar Changbin Du Committed by Jonathan Corbet

Documentation: x86: convert tlb.txt to reST

This converts the plain text documentation to reStructuredText format and
add it to Sphinx TOC tree. No essential content change.
Signed-off-by: default avatarChangbin Du <changbin.du@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+samsung@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
parent 0c2d3639
......@@ -15,3 +15,4 @@ x86-specific Documentation
entry_64
earlyprintk
zero-page
tlb
.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
=======
The TLB
=======
When the kernel unmaps or modified the attributes of a range of
memory, it has two choices:
1. Flush the entire TLB with a two-instruction sequence. This is
a quick operation, but it causes collateral damage: TLB entries
from areas other than the one we are trying to flush will be
......@@ -10,6 +17,7 @@ memory, it has two choices:
damage to other TLB entries.
Which method to do depends on a few things:
1. The size of the flush being performed. A flush of the entire
address space is obviously better performed by flushing the
entire TLB than doing 2^48/PAGE_SIZE individual flushes.
......@@ -33,7 +41,7 @@ well. There is essentially no "right" point to choose.
You may be doing too many individual invalidations if you see the
invlpg instruction (or instructions _near_ it) show up high in
profiles. If you believe that individual invalidations being
called too often, you can lower the tunable:
called too often, you can lower the tunable::
/sys/kernel/debug/x86/tlb_single_page_flush_ceiling
......@@ -43,7 +51,7 @@ Setting it to 1 is a very conservative setting and it should
never need to be 0 under normal circumstances.
Despite the fact that a single individual flush on x86 is
guaranteed to flush a full 2MB [1], hugetlbfs always uses the full
guaranteed to flush a full 2MB [1]_, hugetlbfs always uses the full
flushes. THP is treated exactly the same as normal memory.
You might see invlpg inside of flush_tlb_mm_range() show up in
......@@ -54,15 +62,15 @@ Essentially, you are balancing the cycles you spend doing invlpg
with the cycles that you spend refilling the TLB later.
You can measure how expensive TLB refills are by using
performance counters and 'perf stat', like this:
performance counters and 'perf stat', like this::
perf stat -e
cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x84,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_duration/,
cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x82,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_completed/,
cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x4,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_duration/,
cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x2,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_completed/,
cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x4,name=itlb_misses_walk_duration/,
cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x2,name=itlb_misses_walk_completed/
perf stat -e
cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x84,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_duration/,
cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x82,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_completed/,
cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x4,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_duration/,
cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x2,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_completed/,
cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x4,name=itlb_misses_walk_duration/,
cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x2,name=itlb_misses_walk_completed/
That works on an IvyBridge-era CPU (i5-3320M). Different CPUs
may have differently-named counters, but they should at least
......@@ -70,6 +78,6 @@ be there in some form. You can use pmu-tools 'ocperf list'
(https://github.com/andikleen/pmu-tools) to find the right
counters for a given CPU.
1. A footnote in Intel's SDM "4.10.4.2 Recommended Invalidation"
.. [1] A footnote in Intel's SDM "4.10.4.2 Recommended Invalidation"
says: "One execution of INVLPG is sufficient even for a page
with size greater than 4 KBytes."
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