Re: ZFS committed to the FreeBSD base.

From: Oliver Fromme <olli_at_lurza.secnetix.de>
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:52:45 +0200 (CEST)
Bruce Evans wrote:
 > Not for cmpxchg8b, at least.  It is a remarkably slow instruction.  On
 > AthlonXP's it has an execution latency of 39 cycles.  cmpxchg only has an
 > cmpxchg only has an execution latency of 6 cycles (both without a lock
 > prefix).  I don't know how to avoid using cmpxchg8b short of using a
 > mutex lock/unlock pair and slightly different semantics, or a generation
 > count and very different semantics, but without lock prefixes the
 > mutex pair would be much faster than the cmpxchg8b.

Using cmpxchg8b with a lock prefix wouldn't be a good idea
anyway.  If I remember correctly, the lock cmpxchg8b
combination was the cause of the infamous "F00F" bug of
old Pentium processors.  It causes them to freeze.
(FreeBSD has a hack to work around the problem, as you
certainly know ...  I don't know exactly how it works.)

Best regards
   Oliver

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and a God to make them do anything useful.
Received on Fri Apr 13 2007 - 12:53:04 UTC

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