[Xen-devel] Re: vsyscalls may be going away... impact on Xen time performance on Linux in the future?

[Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx>]

On 06/09/2011 02:55 PM, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> Hmmm...
>
> It appears that Xen time mechanisms that use vsyscall may be
> getting slower...
>
> "This is a significant performance penalty (~220ns here) for
> all vsyscall users, but there aren't many left."
>
> http://lwn.net/Articles/446220/ 
>
> I honestly don't remember all the details myself anymore,
> but I think this means that user apps in Xen PV domains
> that call gettimeofday a *lot* may be in for a bit of
> a shock when they move to a 3.x kernel in the future.
> (Many enterprise apps do things like timestamp transactions,
> which can lead to 10s of thousands of gettimeofday's
> per second.)

He's talking about vsyscall, but not vdso.  vsyscall mechanism is the
old one where kernel-provided code was mapped into userspace at fixed
addresses which were part of the ABI.  Its only used by very old
versions of glibc.

The newer vdso mechanism provides a full shared object, which contains
symbols for the entrypoints so they don't need to be a fixed addresses
any more.

They're functionally equivalent, so there's no loss of performance from
dropping vsyscalls.

    J

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