Date: Sun, 10 Nov 1996 15:40:42 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: dyson@freebsd.org Cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bad news: kind-of about page coloring Message-ID: <199611102240.PAA17065@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199611101926.OAA06336@dyson.iquest.net> from "John S. Dyson" at Nov 10, 96 02:26:05 pm
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> As some of you know, I just got a PP motherboard (mostly to be able > to work on SMP in the near future.) For now, I just have one processor, > and have been studying it (in relation to FreeBSD.) As I kind-of expected > due to the 4 way 2nd level cache on the PP, the page coloring code appears > to be more of a hinderance than an advantage. I did find a significant > improvement on the Pentium though. Just to let you know, I am going to > make the coloring code work by setting itself up at runtime as opposed > to compile time. The coloring code does have a liability of messing up > our page caching stats (a little bit), but since the the PP cache is > 4 way associative, we don't need the coloring nearly as much. So, IMO, > coloring appears to be generally bad on the PPro. I'm a bit curious: how would you gage the associativity of a two processor system? Ie: is it possible that an N processor (N>1) PP system would still benefit from coloring if it was layered on top of the coherency model? I assume the code is on top of the coherency model, in any case... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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