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Revision 5d5fc33ce58e81e8738816f5ee59f8e85fd3b404 authored by Anton Blanchard on 07 June 2024, 06:13:35 UTC, committed by Palmer Dabbelt on 26 July 2024, 12:50:45 UTC 
riscv: Improve exception and system call latency
 
Many CPUs implement return address branch prediction as a stack. The
RISCV architecture refers to this as a return address stack (RAS). If
this gets corrupted then the CPU will mispredict at least one but
potentally many function returns.

There are two issues with the current RISCV exception code:

- We are using the alternate link stack (x5/t0) for the indirect branch
  which makes the hardware think this is a function return. This will
  corrupt the RAS.

- We modify the return address of handle_exception to point to
  ret_from_exception. This will also corrupt the RAS.

Testing the null system call latency before and after the patch:

Visionfive2 (StarFive JH7110 / U74)
baseline: 189.87 ns
patched:  176.76 ns

Lichee pi 4a (T-Head TH1520 / C910)
baseline: 666.58 ns
patched:  636.90 ns

Just over 7% on the U74 and just over 4% on the C910.

Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <antonb@tenstorrent.com>
Signed-off-by: Cyril Bur <cyrilbur@tenstorrent.com>
Tested-by: Jisheng Zhang <jszhang@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jisheng Zhang <jszhang@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240607061335.2197383-1-cyrilbur@tenstorrent.com
Signed-off-by: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@rivosinc.com>
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Raw File
initramfs_data.S 
/* SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0 */
/*
  initramfs_data includes the compressed binary that is the
  filesystem used for early user space.
  Note: Older versions of "as" (prior to binutils 2.11.90.0.23
  released on 2001-07-14) dit not support .incbin.
  If you are forced to use older binutils than that then the
  following trick can be applied to create the resulting binary:


  ld -m elf_i386  --format binary --oformat elf32-i386 -r \
  -T initramfs_data.scr initramfs_data.cpio.gz -o initramfs_data.o
   ld -m elf_i386  -r -o built-in.a initramfs_data.o

  For including the .init.ramfs sections, see include/asm-generic/vmlinux.lds.

  The above example is for i386 - the parameters vary from architectures.
  Eventually look up LDFLAGS_BLOB in an older version of the
  arch/$(ARCH)/Makefile to see the flags used before .incbin was introduced.

  Using .incbin has the advantage over ld that the correct flags are set
  in the ELF header, as required by certain architectures.
*/

.section .init.ramfs,"a"
__irf_start:
.incbin "usr/initramfs_inc_data"
__irf_end:
.section .init.ramfs.info,"a"
.globl __initramfs_size
__initramfs_size:
#ifdef CONFIG_64BIT
	.quad __irf_end - __irf_start
#else
	.long __irf_end - __irf_start
#endif
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