This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled powerpc: Avoid taking a data miss on every userspace instruction miss to the 4.9-stable tree which can be found at: http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary The filename of the patch is: powerpc-avoid-taking-a-data-miss-on-every-userspace-instruction-miss.patch and it can be found in the queue-4.9 subdirectory. If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <stable@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> know about it. >From foo@baz Sun Mar 18 16:55:33 CET 2018 From: Anton Blanchard <anton@xxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 3 Apr 2017 16:41:02 +1000 Subject: powerpc: Avoid taking a data miss on every userspace instruction miss From: Anton Blanchard <anton@xxxxxxxxx> [ Upstream commit a7a9dcd882a67b68568868b988289fce5ffd8419 ] Early on in do_page_fault() we call store_updates_sp(), regardless of the type of exception. For an instruction miss this doesn't make sense, because we only use this information to detect if a data miss is the result of a stack expansion instruction or not. Worse still, it results in a data miss within every userspace instruction miss handler, because we try and load the very instruction we are about to install a pte for! A simple exec microbenchmark runs 6% faster on POWER8 with this fix: #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { unsigned long left = atol(argv[1]); char leftstr[16]; if (left-- == 0) return 0; sprintf(leftstr, "%ld", left); execlp(argv[0], argv[0], leftstr, NULL); perror("exec failed\n"); return 0; } Pass the number of iterations on the command line (eg 10000) and time how long it takes to execute. Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@xxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Michael Ellerman <mpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <alexander.levin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- arch/powerpc/mm/fault.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) --- a/arch/powerpc/mm/fault.c +++ b/arch/powerpc/mm/fault.c @@ -294,7 +294,7 @@ int do_page_fault(struct pt_regs *regs, * can result in fault, which will cause a deadlock when called with * mmap_sem held */ - if (user_mode(regs)) + if (!is_exec && user_mode(regs)) store_update_sp = store_updates_sp(regs); if (user_mode(regs)) Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from anton@xxxxxxxxx are queue-4.9/powerpc-avoid-taking-a-data-miss-on-every-userspace-instruction-miss.patch