equivalence of contexts is detected by keeping a pointer in each cloned context pointing to the context it was cloned from. To cope with the situation where a context is changed by adding or removing counters after it has been cloned, we also keep a generation number on each context which is incremented every time a context is changed. When a context is cloned we take a copy of the parent's generation number, and two cloned contexts are equivalent only if they have the same parent and the same generation number. In order that the parent context pointer remains valid (and is not reused), we increment the parent context's reference count for each context cloned from it. Since we don't have individual fds for the counters in a cloned context, the only thing that can make two clones of a given parent different after they have been cloned is enabling or disabling all counters with prctl. To account for this, we keep a count of the number of enabled counters in each context. Two contexts must have the same number of enabled counters to be considered equivalent. Here are some measurements of the context switch time as measured with the lat_ctx benchmark from lmbench, comparing the times obtained with and without this patch series: -----Unmodified----- With this patch series Counters: none 2 HW 4H+4S none 2 HW 4H+4S 2 processes: Average 3.44 6.45 11.24 3.12 3.39 3.60 St dev 0.04 0.04 0.13 0.05 0.17 0.19 8 processes: Average 6.45 8.79 14.00 5.57 6.23 7.57 St dev 1.27 1.04 0.88 1.42 1.46 1.42 32 processes: Average 5.56 8.43 13.78 5.28 5.55 7.15 St dev 0.41 0.47 0.53 0.54 0.57 0.81 The numbers are the mean and standard deviation of 20 runs of lat_ctx. The "none" columns are lat_ctx run directly without any counters. The "2 HW" columns are with lat_ctx run under perfstat, counting cycles and instructions. The "4H+4S" columns are lat_ctx run under perfstat with 4 hardware counters and 4 software counters (cycles, instructions, cache references, cache misses, task clock, context switch, cpu migrations, and page faults). [ Impact: performance optimization of counter context-switches ] Signed-off-by: Paul Mackerras Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra Cc: Corey Ashford Cc: Marcelo Tosatti Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo LKML-Reference: <18966.10666.517218.332164@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar èž