[RFC PATCH] getcpu_cache system call: caching current CPU number (x86)

[Mathieu Desnoyers]

----- On Jul 13, 2015, at 7:17 AM, Ben Maurer bmaurer@fb.com wrote:

> At Facebook we already use getcpu in folly, our base C++ library, to provide
> high performance concurrency algorithms. Folly includes an abstraction called
> AccessSpreader which helps engineers write abstractions which shard themselves
> across different cores to prevent cache contention
> (https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/detail/CacheLocality.cpp).
> We have used this primative to create faster reader writer locks
> (https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/SharedMutex.h), as well as
> in an abstraction that powers workqueues
> (https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/IndexedMemPool.h). This
> would be a great perf improvement for these types of abstractions and probably
> encourage us to use the idea more widely.
> 
> One quick comment on the approach -- it'd be really great if we had a method
> that didn't require users to register each thread. This can often lead to
> requiring an additional branch in critical code to check if the appropriate
> caches have been initialized. Also, one of the most interesting potential
> applications of the restartable sequences concept is in malloc. having a brief
> period at the beginning of the life of a thread where malloc didn't work would
> be pretty tricky to program around.

If we invoke this per-thread registration directly in the glibc NPTL implementation,
in start_thread, do you think it would fit your requirements ?

Thanks,

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
EfficiOS Inc.
http://www.efficios.com