Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 10/13] tb hash: hash phys_pc, pc, and flags with xxhash

[Richard Henderson]

On 04/07/2016 10:32 AM, Emilio G. Cota wrote:
> For some workloads such as arm bootup, tb_phys_hash is performance-critical.
> The is due to the high frequency of accesses to the hash table, originated
> by (frequent) TLB flushes that wipe out the cpu-private tb_jmp_cache's.
> More info:
>   https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-03/msg05098.html
> 
> To dig further into this I modified an arm image booting debian jessie to
> immediately shut down after boot. Analysis revealed that quite a bit of time
> is unnecessarily spent in tb_phys_hash: the cause is poor hashing that
> results in very uneven loading of chains in the hash table's buckets;
> the longest observed chain had ~550 elements.
> 
> The appended addresses this with two changes:
> 
> 1) Use xxhash as the hash table's hash function. xxhash is a fast,
>    high-quality hashing function.
> 
> 2) Feed the hashing function with not just tb_phys, but also pc and flags.

Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <address@hidden>


r~