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Paul Mackerras authored
Impact: new feature giving performance improvement This adds the ability for userspace to do an mmap on a hardware counter fd and get access to a read-only page that contains the information needed to translate a hardware counter value to the full 64-bit counter value that would be returned by a read on the fd. This is useful on architectures that allow user programs to read the hardware counters, such as PowerPC. The mmap will only succeed if the counter is a hardware counter monitoring the current process. On my quad 2.5GHz PowerPC 970MP machine, userspace can read a counter and translate it to the full 64-bit value in about 30ns using the mmapped page, compared to about 830ns for the read syscall on the counter, so this does give a significant performance improvement. Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Orig-LKML-Reference: <20090323172417.297057964@chello.nl> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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