This repo contains the tooling for the master thesis Analysis of the reduction of ITLB cache pressure through code collocation based on the Linux kernel which can be found in the docs branch.
Read TEST-INSTRUCTIONS.rst for more information.
This thesis explores the potential for performance improvement by reducing instruction lookaside buffer (ITLB) pressure through code collocation in the kernel. The objective is to reorder frequently used caller-callee function pairs within the .text section, aiming to increase the ITLB hit-rate and subsequently minimize ITLB misses and page faults. Automatic methods, such as the call chain clustering (C3) heuristic, are proposed to facilitate code reorganization. The findings demonstrate the effectiveness of code collocation, specifically with the utilization of the C3 heuristic, in reducing ITLB pressure for specific workloads in the kernel. However, to establish broader applicability, further testing with diverse configurations is recommended.