58 lines
1.5 KiB
Text
58 lines
1.5 KiB
Text
When developing a fast compiler for the Sun-4 series we have encountered
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rather strange behavior of the Sun kernel.
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The problem is that with lots of nested procedure calls, (as
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is often the case in compilers and parsers) the registers fill up which
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causes a kernel trap. The kernel will then write out some of the registers
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to memory to make room for another window. When returning from the nested
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procedure call, just the reverse happens: yet another kernel trap so the
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kernel can load the register from memory.
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Unfortunately the kernel only saves or loads a single window (= 16 register)
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on each trap. This means that when calling a procedure recursively it causes
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a kernel trap on almost every invocation (except for the first few).
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To illustrate this consider the following little program:
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--------------- little program -------------
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f(i) /* calls itself i times */
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int i;
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{
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if (i)
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f(i-1);
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}
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main(argc, argv)
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int argc;
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char *argv[];
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{
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i = atoi(argv[1]); /* # loops */
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j = atoi(argv[2]); /* depth */
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while (i--)
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f(j);
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}
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------------ end of little program -----------
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The performance decreases abruptly when the depth (j) becomes larger
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than 5. On a SPARC station we got the following results:
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depth run time (in seconds)
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1 0.5
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2 0.8
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3 1.0
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4 1.4 <- from here on it's +6 seconds for each
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5 7.6 step deeper.
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6 13.9
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7 19.9
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8 26.3
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9 32.9
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Things would be a lot better when instead of just 1, the kernel would
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save or restore 4 windows (= 64 registers = 50% on our SPARC stations).
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-Raymond.
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