Profiling Interrupt Handler Performance through Kernel Instrumentation
نویسندگان
چکیده
As a result of technology trends towards multi-gigahertz processors, the I/O system is becoming a critical bottleneck for many applications. Interrupts are a major aspect of most device drivers. Characterizing interrupt performance and its relation to architectural trends is important for understanding and improving I/O subsystem performance. Kernel instrumentation in combination with performance counters is able to overcome the limitations of microbenchmarks when measuring interrupts. A comparative analysis of a range of IA-32 based systems reveals that interrupt handler code exhibits only a low degree of instruction-level parallelism. Consequently, the trend towards deeper processor pipelines and smaller caches to maximize clock frequency can be detrimental to interrupt handling performance.
منابع مشابه
Interrupt Protocol Processing in the x - kernel Mats Björkman
On many modern processors, context switches are costly in terms of latency. In this report, we argue that latency caused by kernel thread scheduling for incoming network messages can be avoided in a number of common situations, where instead the interrupt handler itself can perform the necessary protocol processing. For processors with high context switch costs, this can give a significant perf...
متن کاملProfiling I/O Interrupts in Modern Architectures
As applications grow increasingly communication-oriented, interrupt performance quickly becomes a crucial component of high performance I/O system design. At the same time, accurately measuring interrupt handler performance is difficult with the traditional simulation, instrumentation, or statistical sampling approaches. One of the most important components of interrupt performance is cache beh...
متن کاملCS262A Midterm Solutions
[Yahel Ben-David:] I’ll presume the hardware used is the easier case of MIPS. The x86 architecture complicates things as some instructions may silently fail if not run under a real “ring-0” privileges. Before delving into the flow of control for handling a system-call (syscall) on a virtualized system, let’s briefly discuss what happens in a traditional setting (without virtualization): When th...
متن کاملA Revisitation of Kernel Synchronization Schemes
In an operating system kernel, critical sections of code must be protected from interruption. This is traditionally accomplished by masking the set of interrupts whose handlers interfere with the correct operation of the critical section. Because it can be expensive to communicate with an off-chip interrupt controller, more complex optimistic techniques for masking interrupts have been proposed...
متن کاملProfiler for Control System in System Level Design
This paper introduces a profiler architecture for control systems in system-level design. When designing a control system, we need to consider two things. The first thing is the asynchronous signal coming from sensors and actuators, which is called an interrupt request signal. The second thing is a process that should take a higher priority and be activated by an interrupt request signal, which...
متن کامل