Re: [Xen-devel] Question about high CPU load during iperf ethernet testing

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2014, Iurii Konovalenko wrote:
> Hi, Ian!
> 
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 7:48 PM, Ian Campbell <Ian.Campbell@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 16:01 +0300, Iurii Konovalenko wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> I decided to debug a bit, so I used "({register uint64_t _r; asm
> >> volatile("mrrc " "p15, 0, %0, %H0, c14" ";" : "=r" (_r)); _r; })"
> >> command to read timer counter before and after operations I want to
> >> test.
> >
> > I think that is CNTPCT aka the physical timer. This is trapped under
> > Xen. If you want an untrapped source of time you should use CNTVCT which
> > is p15,0,c14.
> >
> > I expect the results are unreliable due to this.
> 
> Thanks a lot for advice.
> Arm docs say CNTPCT is p15,0,c14, CNTVCT is p15,1,c14. Now I tried both,
> but results are almost equal.
> 
> > Also watch out that the granularity of those two timers is usually far
> > below the CPU clock frequency, so one tick of them can potentially
> > represent quite a few clock cycles/instructions IIRC.
> 
> I do not need to get very accurate  value, just to understand place,
> where time is spent.
> These part of code is called many-many times, I accumulate all single
> times, so approximately it seams good for me.
> 
> I made some experiments, like:
> - evaluated time of whole ethernet poll function
> - broke this function into several parts and measured time of that
> parts, then summed.
> Values were almost the same value, so I decided, that in such way I
> can understand which part spends more time, and which spends less.
> 
> Please, could you advice method to accurate measure time in Xen?

In the Xen hypervisor? You can simply call get_s_time().
In the guest kernel using CNTVCT is the best option as it is not
trapped.

_______________________________________________
Xen-devel mailing list
Xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-devel