RE: [Xen-devel] Re: vsyscalls may be going away... impact on Xen time performance on Linux in the future?

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> > I honestly don't remember all the details myself anymore,
> > but I think this means that user apps in Xen PV domains
> > that call gettimeofday a *lot* may be in for a bit of
> > a shock when they move to a 3.x kernel in the future.
> > (Many enterprise apps do things like timestamp transactions,
> > which can lead to 10s of thousands of gettimeofday's
> > per second.)
> 
> He's talking about vsyscall, but not vdso.  vsyscall mechanism is the
> old one where kernel-provided code was mapped into userspace at fixed
> addresses which were part of the ABI.  Its only used by very old
> versions of glibc.
> 
> The newer vdso mechanism provides a full shared object, which contains
> symbols for the entrypoints so they don't need to be a fixed addresses
> any more.
> 
> They're functionally equivalent, so there's no loss of performance from
> dropping vsyscalls.

Excellent... thanks for the reassurance.

Dan

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