The cost of Linux's page fault handling

Re:The cost of Linux's page fault handling by michaelf on Thursday May 01, 2014 @02:13PM (#7681632)

Can anyone hazard a guess as to how Linus was able to measure the cost of a page fault and an iret so precisely? What tools and techniques might he have used?

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Re:The cost of Linux's page fault handling by apw on Friday May 02, 2014 @10:30AM (#7685867)

It's quite likely that he was using `perf':

    $ perf stat make
    ...
    116,222 page-faults               #    0.046 M/sec
    ...

https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Tutorial

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Re:The cost of Linux's page fault handling by zerohp on Thursday May 01, 2014 @03:19PM (#7682107)

I don't know what he used, but its probably based on the model specific registers for performance counters. See Chapter 18 of the Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual.

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