o Allocate a VHPT per CPU. The VHPT is a hash table that the CPU
uses to look up translations it can't find in the TLB. As such,
the VHPT serves as a level 1 cache (the TLB being a level 0 cache)
and best results are obtained when it's not shared between CPUs.
The collision chain (i.e. the hash bucket) is shared between CPUs,
as all buckets together constitute our collection of PTEs. To
achieve this, the collision chain does not point to the first PTE
in the list anymore, but to a hash bucket head structure. The
head structure contains the pointer to the first PTE in the list,
as well as a mutex to lock the bucket. Thus, each bucket is locked
independently of each other. With at least 1024 buckets in the VHPT,
this provides for sufficiently finei-grained locking to make the
ssolution scalable to large SMP machines.
o Add synchronisation to the lazy FP context switching. We do this
with a seperate per-thread lock. On SMP machines the lazy high FP
context switching without synchronisation caused inconsistent
state, which resulted in a panic. Since the use of the high FP
registers is not common, it's possible that races exist. The ia64
package build has proven to be a good stress test, so this will
get plenty of exercise in the near future.
o Don't use the local ID of the processor we want to send the IPI to
as the argument to ipi_send(). use the struct pcpu pointer instead.
The reason for this is that IPI delivery is unreliable. It has been
observed that sending an IPI to a CPU causes it to receive a stray
external interrupt. As such, we need a way to make the delivery
reliable. The intended solution is to queue requests in the target
CPU's per-CPU structure and use a single IPI to inform the CPU that
there's a new entry in the queue. If that IPI gets lost, the CPU
can check it's queue at any convenient time (such as for each
clock interrupt). This also allows us to send requests to a CPU
without interrupting it, if such would be beneficial.
With these changes SMP is almost working. There are still some random
process crashes and the machine can hang due to having the IPI lost
that deals with the high FP context switch.
The overhead of introducing the hash bucket head structure results
in a performance degradation of about 1% for UP (extra pointer
indirection). This is surprisingly small and is offset by gaining
reasonably/good scalable SMP support.
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