Having a fixed-size hash table for keeping track of all translation blocks
is suboptimal: some workloads are just too big or too small to get maximum
performance from the hash table. The MRU promotion policy helps improve
performance when the hash table is a little undersized, but it cannot
make up for severely undersized hash tables.
Furthermore, frequent MRU promotions result in writes that are a scalability
bottleneck. For scalability, lookups should only perform reads, not writes.
This is not a big deal for now, but it will become one once MTTCG matures.
The appended fixes these issues by using qht as the implementation of
the TB hash table. This solution is superior to other alternatives considered,
namely:
- master: implementation in QEMU before this patchset
- xxhash: before this patch, i.e. fixed buckets + xxhash hashing + MRU.
- xxhash-rcu: fixed buckets + xxhash + RCU list + MRU.
MRU is implemented here by adding an intermediate struct
that contains the u32 hash and a pointer to the TB; this
allows us, on an MRU promotion, to copy said struct (that is not
at the head), and put this new copy at the head. After a grace
period, the original non-head struct can be eliminated, and
after another grace period, freed.
- qht-fixed-nomru: fixed buckets + xxhash + qht without auto-resize +
no MRU for lookups; MRU for inserts.
The appended solution is the following:
- qht-dyn-nomru: dynamic number of buckets + xxhash + qht w/ auto-resize +
no MRU for lookups; MRU for inserts.
The plots below compare the considered solutions. The Y axis shows the
boot time (in seconds) of a debian jessie image with arm-softmmu; the X axis
sweeps the number of buckets (or initial number of buckets for qht-autoresize).
The plots in PNG format (and with errorbars) can be seen here:
http://imgur.com/a/Awgnq
Each test runs 5 times, and the entire QEMU process is pinned to a
single core for repeatability of results.
Host: Intel Xeon E5-2690
28 ++------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+------------++
A***** + + + master **A*** +
27 ++ * xxhash ##B###++
| A******A****** xxhash-rcu $$C$$$ |
26 C$$ A******A****** qht-fixed-nomru*%%D%%%++
D%%$$ A******A******A*qht-dyn-mru A*E****A
25 ++ %%$$ qht-dyn-nomru &&F&&&++
B#####% |
24 ++ #C$$$$$ ++
| B### $ |
| ## C$$$$$$ |
23 ++ # C$$$$$$ ++
| B###### C$$$$$$ %%%D
22 ++ %B###### C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C
| D%%%%%%B###### @E@@@@@@ %%%D%%%@@@E@@@@@@E
21 E@@@@@@E@@@@@@F&&&@@@E@@@&&&D%%%%%%B######B######B######B######B######B
+ E@@@ F&&& + E@ + F&&& + +
20 ++------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+------------++
14 16 18 20 22 24
log2 number of buckets
Host: Intel i7-4790K
14.5 ++------------+------------+-------------+------------+------------++
A** + + + master **A*** +
14 ++ ** xxhash ##B###++
13.5 ++ ** xxhash-rcu $$C$$$++
| qht-fixed-nomru %%D%%% |
13 ++ A****** qht-dyn-mru @@E@@@++
| A*****A******A****** qht-dyn-nomru &&F&&& |
12.5 C$$ A******A******A*****A****** ***A
12 ++ $$ A*** ++
D%%% $$ |
11.5 ++ %% ++
B### %C$$$$$$ |
11 ++ ## D%%%%% C$$$$$ ++
| # % C$$$$$$ |
10.5 F&&&&&&B######D%%%%% C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$$C$$$$$C$$$$$$ $$$C
10 E@@@@@@E@@@@@@B#####B######B######E@@@@@@E@@@%%%D%%%%%D%%%###B######B
+ F&& D%%%%%%B######B######B#####B###@@@D%%% +
9.5 ++------------+------------+-------------+------------+------------++
14 16 18 20 22 24
log2 number of buckets
Note that the original point before this patch series is X=15 for "master";
the little sensitivity to the increased number of buckets is due to the
poor hashing function in master.
xxhash-rcu has significant overhead due to the constant churn of allocating
and deallocating intermediate structs for implementing MRU. An alternative
would be do consider failed lookups as "maybe not there", and then
acquire the external lock (tb_lock in this case) to really confirm that
there was indeed a failed lookup. This, however, would not be enough
to implement dynamic resizing--this is more complex: see
"Resizable, Scalable, Concurrent Hash Tables via Relativistic
Programming" by Triplett, McKenney and Walpole. This solution was
discarded due to the very coarse RCU read critical sections that we have
in MTTCG; resizing requires waiting for readers after every pointer update,
and resizes require many pointer updates, so this would quickly become
prohibitive.
qht-fixed-nomru shows that MRU promotion is advisable for undersized
hash tables.
However, qht-dyn-mru shows that MRU promotion is not important if the
hash table is properly sized: there is virtually no difference in
performance between qht-dyn-nomru and qht-dyn-mru.
Before this patch, we're at X=15 on "xxhash"; after this patch, we're at
X=15 @ qht-dyn-nomru. This patch thus matches the best performance that we
can achieve with optimum sizing of the hash table, while keeping the hash
table scalable for readers.
The improvement we get before and after this patch for booting debian jessie
with arm-softmmu is:
- Intel Xeon E5-2690: 10.5% less time
- Intel i7-4790K: 5.2% less time
We could get this same improvement _for this particular workload_ by
statically increasing the size of the hash table. But this would hurt
workloads that do not need a large hash table. The dynamic (upward)
resizing allows us to start small and enlarge the hash table as needed.
A quick note on downsizing: the table is resized back to 2**15 buckets
on every tb_flush; this makes sense because it is not guaranteed that the
table will reach the same number of TBs later on (e.g. most bootup code is
thrown away after boot); it makes sense to grow the hash table as
more code blocks are translated. This also avoids the complication of
having to build downsizing hysteresis logic into qht.
Reviewed-by: Sergey Fedorov <serge.fedorov@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
Signed-off-by: Emilio G. Cota <cota@braap.org>
Message-Id: <1465412133-3029-15-git-send-email-cota@braap.org>
Signed-off-by: Richard Henderson <rth@twiddle.net>
QEMU README
===========
QEMU is a generic and open source machine & userspace emulator and
virtualizer.
QEMU is capable of emulating a complete machine in software without any
need for hardware virtualization support. By using dynamic translation,
it achieves very good performance. QEMU can also integrate with the Xen
and KVM hypervisors to provide emulated hardware while allowing the
hypervisor to manage the CPU. With hypervisor support, QEMU can achieve
near native performance for CPUs. When QEMU emulates CPUs directly it is
capable of running operating systems made for one machine (e.g. an ARMv7
board) on a different machine (e.g. an x86_64 PC board).
QEMU is also capable of providing userspace API virtualization for Linux
and BSD kernel interfaces. This allows binaries compiled against one
architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux PPC64 ABI) to be run on a host using a
different architecture ABI (e.g. the Linux x86_64 ABI). This does not
involve any hardware emulation, simply CPU and syscall emulation.
QEMU aims to fit into a variety of use cases. It can be invoked directly
by users wishing to have full control over its behaviour and settings.
It also aims to facilitate integration into higher level management
layers, by providing a stable command line interface and monitor API.
It is commonly invoked indirectly via the libvirt library when using
open source applications such as oVirt, OpenStack and virt-manager.
QEMU as a whole is released under the GNU General Public License,
version 2. For full licensing details, consult the LICENSE file.
Building
========
QEMU is multi-platform software intended to be buildable on all modern
Linux platforms, OS-X, Win32 (via the Mingw64 toolchain) and a variety
of other UNIX targets. The simple steps to build QEMU are:
mkdir build
cd build
../configure
make
Complete details of the process for building and configuring QEMU for
all supported host platforms can be found in the qemu-tech.html file.
Additional information can also be found online via the QEMU website:
http://qemu-project.org/Hosts/Linux
http://qemu-project.org/Hosts/W32
Submitting patches
==================
The QEMU source code is maintained under the GIT version control system.
git clone git://git.qemu-project.org/qemu.git
When submitting patches, the preferred approach is to use 'git
format-patch' and/or 'git send-email' to format & send the mail to the
qemu-devel@nongnu.org mailing list. All patches submitted must contain
a 'Signed-off-by' line from the author. Patches should follow the
guidelines set out in the HACKING and CODING_STYLE files.
Additional information on submitting patches can be found online via
the QEMU website
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/TrivialPatches
Bug reporting
=============
The QEMU project uses Launchpad as its primary upstream bug tracker. Bugs
found when running code built from QEMU git or upstream released sources
should be reported via:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/
If using QEMU via an operating system vendor pre-built binary package, it
is preferable to report bugs to the vendor's own bug tracker first. If
the bug is also known to affect latest upstream code, it can also be
reported via launchpad.
For additional information on bug reporting consult:
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/ReportABug
Contact
=======
The QEMU community can be contacted in a number of ways, with the two
main methods being email and IRC
- qemu-devel@nongnu.org
http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/qemu-devel
- #qemu on irc.oftc.net
Information on additional methods of contacting the community can be
found online via the QEMU website:
http://qemu-project.org/Contribute/StartHere
-- End
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