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authorChangbin Du <changbin.du@gmail.com>2019-05-08 23:21:23 +0800
committerJonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>2019-05-08 14:34:10 -0600
commit17156044b11c878a9fdd8326cf47bc0cbd1aa918 (patch)
tree8f7a9328d1cfe963ad6422d7c6dbd3fa02d52801 /Documentation/x86
parent0c2d3639a81b1033f3cb5d3c5ae4d9e7e1313cc4 (diff)
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: Changbin Du <changbin.du@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+samsung@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/x86')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/x86/index.rst1
-rw-r--r--Documentation/x86/tlb.rst (renamed from Documentation/x86/tlb.txt)30
2 files changed, 20 insertions, 11 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/x86/index.rst b/Documentation/x86/index.rst
index e43aa9b31976..c4ea25350221 100644
--- a/Documentation/x86/index.rst
+++ b/Documentation/x86/index.rst
@@ -15,3 +15,4 @@ x86-specific Documentation
entry_64
earlyprintk
zero-page
+ tlb
diff --git a/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt b/Documentation/x86/tlb.rst
index 6a0607b99ed8..82ec58ae63a8 100644
--- a/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt
+++ b/Documentation/x86/tlb.rst
@@ -1,5 +1,12 @@
+.. 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."