Re: Feedback on 4.9 performance after PTI fixes

From: Willy Tarreau
Date: Mon Jan 08 2018 - 13:26:38 EST


Hi Yves-Alexis,

On Mon, Jan 08, 2018 at 06:07:54PM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On Sun, 2018-01-07 at 11:18 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> > - the highest performance impact on VMs comes from having PTI on the
> > guest kernel (-45%). At this point it makes no difference whether
> > the host kernel has it or not.
>
> Hi Willy,
>
> out of curiosity, is the pcid/invpcid flags exposed to and used by your guest
> CPU? It might very well that the PCID optimisations are not used by the guests
> here, and it might be worth either checking on bare metal or with the PCID
> optimisations enabled.

You're totally right, I discovered during my later developments that
indeed PCID is not exposed there. So we take the hit of a full TLB
flush twice per syscall.

Willy