Re: spin loop 100x faster in user mode (CPL=3) than superuser (CPL=0)?

[Alex Bennée]

Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org> writes:

> Garrick Toubassi <gtoubassi@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I went ahead and created a short repro case which can be found at 
>> https://github.com/gtoubassi/qemu-spinrepro.  Would appreciate
>> thoughts from anyone or guidance on how to debug.
>
> Well something weird is going on that is chewing through the code
> generation logic. If you run with:
>
>  ./qemu-system-x86_64 -serial mon:stdio -kernel ~/Downloads/kernel.img
>
> And then C-a c to bring up the monitor you can type "info jit" and see:
>
>   (qemu) info jit
>   Translation buffer state:
>   gen code size       1063758051/1073736704
>   TB count            1
>   TB avg target size  1 max=1 bytes
>   TB avg host size    64 bytes (expansion ratio: 64.0)
>   cross page TB count 0 (0%)
>   direct jump count   0 (0%) (2 jumps=0 0%)
>   TB hash buckets     1/8192 (0.01% head buckets used)
>   TB hash occupancy   0.00% avg chain occ. Histogram: [0.0,2.5)%|█        
> ▁|[22.5,25.0]%
>   TB hash avg chain   1.000 buckets. Histogram: 1|█|1
>
<snip>

Hmm ok that's just a result of the code disappearing down a hole:

  0x0009fffc:  00 00                    addb     %al, (%bx, %si)
  0x0009fffe:  00 00                    addb     %al, (%bx, %si)
  0x000a0000:  ff                       .byte    0xff
  0x000a0001:  ff                       .byte    0xff

and as that code is being executed out of a place without a phys_pc we
don't cache the TB (by design). Usually this isn't a massive problem but
obviously something has gone wrong in the code to be executing these
junk instructions.

Have you traced the execution of your code via gdbstub?

-- 
Alex Bennée