Linux kernel patches “performance can be harmful” bug in video driver


Remember all those funkily named bugs of recent memory, such as Specter, Meltdown, F ** CKWIT and RAMbleed?

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Very loosely speaking, these types of bugs – perhaps they’re better described as “performance costs” – are a side effect of the ever-increasing demand for ever-faster CPUs, especially now that the average computer or mobile phone has multiple processor chips. , typically with multiple cores, or processing subunits, built into each chip.

Back in the olden days (by which I mean the era of chips like the Inmos Transputer), received wisdom said that the best way to do what is known in the jargon as “parallel computing”, where you split one big job into lots of smaller ones and work on them at the same time, was to have a large number of small and cheap processors that didn’t share any resources.

They each had their own memory chips, which means they didn’t need to worry about hardware synchronization when trying to dip into each other’s memory or to peek into the state of each others’ processor, because they couldn’t.

If job 1 wanted to hand over an intermediate result to job 2, some sort of dedicated communications channel was needed, and accidental interference by one CPU in the behavior of another was therefore sidestepped entirely.

Transputer chips each had four serial data lines that allowed them to be wired up into a chain, mesh or web, and jobs had to be coded to fit the interconnection topology available.

Share-nothing versus share-everything

This model was called share-nothingand it was predicated on the idea that allowing multiple CPUs to share the same memory chips, especially if each CPU had its own local storage for cached copies of recently-used data, was such a complex problem in its own right that it would dominate the cost – and crush the performance – of share-everything parallel computing.

But share-everything computers turned out to be much easier to program than share-nothing systems, and although they generally gave you a smaller number of processors, your computing power was just as good, or better, overall.

So share-everything was the direction in which price / performance and thus the market ultimately went.

After all, if you really wanted to, you could always stitch together several share-everything parallel computers using share-nothing techniques – by exchanging data over an inexpensive LAN, for example – and get the best of both worlds.