On AMD SMM protected memory is part of the address map, but handled
internally like an MTRR. That leads to large pages getting split
internally which has some performance implications. Check for the
AMD TSEG MSR and split the large page mapping on that area
explicitely if it is part of the direct mapping.
There is also SMM ASEG, but it is in the first 1MB and already covered by
the earlier split first page patch.
Idea for this came from an earlier patch by Andreas Herrmann
On a RevF dual Socket Opteron system kernbench shows a clear
improvement from this:
(together with the earlier patches in this series, especially the
split first 2MB patch)
[lower is better]
no split stddev split stddev delta
Elapsed Time 87.146 (0.727516) 84.296 (1.09098) -3.2%
User Time 274.537 (4.05226) 273.692 (3.34344) -0.3%
System Time 34.907 (0.42492) 34.508 (0.26832) -1.1%
Percent CPU 322.5 (38.3007) 326.5 (44.5128) +1.2%
=> About 3.2% improvement in elapsed time for kernbench.
With GB pages on AMD Fam1h the impact of splitting is much higher of course,
since it would split two full GB pages (together with the first
1MB split patch) instead of two 2MB pages. I could not benchmark
a clear difference in kernbench on gbpages, so I kept it disabled
for that case
That was only limited benchmarking of course, so if someone
was interested in running more tests for the gbpages case
that could be revisited (contributions welcome)
I didn't bother implementing this for 32bit because it is very
unlikely the 32bit lowmem mapping overlaps into the TSEG near 4GB
and the 2MB low split is already handled for both.
[ mingo@elte.hu: do it on gbpages kernels too, there's no clear reason
why it shouldnt help there. ]
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