Each event has a 27 bit timestamp delta that is used to hold the delta
from the last event. If the time between events is greater than 2^27, then
a timestamp is added that holds a 59 bit absolute timestamp.
Until a389d86f7f ("ring-buffer: Have nested events still record running
time stamp"), if an interrupt interrupted an event in progress, all the
events delta would be zero to not deal with the races that need to be
handled. The commit a389d86f7f changed that to handle the races giving
all events, even those that preempt other events, still have an accurate
timestamp.
To handle those races requires performing 64-bit cmpxchg on the
timestamps. But doing 64-bit cmpxchg on 32-bit architectures is considered
very slow. To try to deal with this the timestamp logic was broken into
two and then three 32-bit cmpxchgs, with the thought that two (or three)
32-bit cmpxchgs are still faster than a single 64-bit cmpxchg on 32-bit
architectures.
Part of the problem with this is that I didn't have any 32-bit
architectures to test on. After hitting several subtle bugs in this code,
an effort was made to try and see if three 32-bit cmpxchgs are indeed
faster than a single 64-bit. After a few people brushed off the dust of
their old 32-bit machines, tests were done, and even though 32-bit cmpxchg
was faster than a single 64-bit, it was in the order of 50% at best, not
300%.
After some more refactoring of the code, all 4 64-bit cmpxchg were removed:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20231211114420.36dde01b@gandalf.local.homehttps://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20231214222921.193037a7@gandalf.local.homehttps://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20231215081810.1f4f38fe@rorschach.local.homehttps://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20231218230712.3a76b081@gandalf.local.home/
With all the 64-bit cmpxchg removed, the complex 32-bit workaround can also be
removed.
The 32-bit and 64-bit logic is now exactly the same.
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20231213214632.15047c40@gandalf.local.home/
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-trace-kernel/20231219074303.28f9abda@gandalf.local.home
Cc: Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org>
Cc: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Steven Rostedt (Google) <rostedt@goodmis.org>