xref: /freebsd/share/doc/papers/kerntune/4.t (revision 02e9120893770924227138ba49df1edb3896112a)
Copyright (c) 1984 M. K. McKusick
Copyright (c) 1984 The Regents of the University of California.
All rights reserved.

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Conclusions

We have created a profiler that aids in the evaluation of the kernel. For each routine in the kernel, the profile shows the extent to which that routine helps support various abstractions, and how that routine uses other abstractions. The profile assesses the cost of routines at all levels of the kernel decomposition. The profiler is easily used, and can be compiled into the kernel. It adds only five to thirty percent execution overhead to the kernel being profiled, produces no additional output while the kernel is running and allows the kernel to be measured in its real environment. Kernel profiles can be used to identify bottlenecks in performance. We have shown how to improve performance by caching recently calculated name translations. The combined caches added to the name translation process reduce the average cost of translating a pathname to an inode by 35%. These changes reduce the percentage of time spent running in the system by nearly 9%. .nr H2 1

\s+2Acknowledgements\s0

I would like to thank Robert Elz for sharing his ideas and his code for cacheing system wide names. Thanks also to all the users at Berkeley who provided all the input to generate the kernel profiles. This work was supported by the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DoD) under Arpa Order No. 4031 monitored by Naval Electronic System Command under Contract No. N00039-82-C-0235. .nr H2 1

\s+2References\s-2

[Bentley81] 20
Bentley, J. L., ``Writing Efficient Code'', Department of Computer Science, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, CMU-CS-81-116, 1981.
[Graham82] 20
Graham, S., Kessler, P., McKusick, M., ``gprof: A Call Graph Execution Profiler'', Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '82 Symposium on Compiler Construction, Volume 17, Number 6, June 1982. pp 120-126
[Graham83] 20
Graham, S., Kessler, P., McKusick, M., ``An Execution Profiler for Modular Programs'' Software - Practice and Experience, Volume 13, 1983. pp 671-685
[Ritchie74] 20
Ritchie, D. M. and Thompson, K., ``The UNIX Time-Sharing System'', CACM 17, 7. July 1974. pp 365-375