Documentation: x86: convert tlb.txt to reST

This converts the plain text documentation to reStructuredText format and
add it to Sphinx TOC tree. No essential content change.

Signed-off-by: Changbin Du <changbin.du@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+samsung@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 75 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt b/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 6a0607b99ed8..000000000000
--- a/Documentation/x86/tlb.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,75 +0,0 @@
-When the kernel unmaps or modified the attributes of a range of
-memory, it has two choices:
- 1. Flush the entire TLB with a two-instruction sequence.  This is
-    a quick operation, but it causes collateral damage: TLB entries
-    from areas other than the one we are trying to flush will be
-    destroyed and must be refilled later, at some cost.
- 2. Use the invlpg instruction to invalidate a single page at a
-    time.  This could potentially cost many more instructions, but
-    it is a much more precise operation, causing no collateral
-    damage to other TLB entries.
-
-Which method to do depends on a few things:
- 1. The size of the flush being performed.  A flush of the entire
-    address space is obviously better performed by flushing the
-    entire TLB than doing 2^48/PAGE_SIZE individual flushes.
- 2. The contents of the TLB.  If the TLB is empty, then there will
-    be no collateral damage caused by doing the global flush, and
-    all of the individual flush will have ended up being wasted
-    work.
- 3. The size of the TLB.  The larger the TLB, the more collateral
-    damage we do with a full flush.  So, the larger the TLB, the
-    more attractive an individual flush looks.  Data and
-    instructions have separate TLBs, as do different page sizes.
- 4. The microarchitecture.  The TLB has become a multi-level
-    cache on modern CPUs, and the global flushes have become more
-    expensive relative to single-page flushes.
-
-There is obviously no way the kernel can know all these things,
-especially the contents of the TLB during a given flush.  The
-sizes of the flush will vary greatly depending on the workload as
-well.  There is essentially no "right" point to choose.
-
-You may be doing too many individual invalidations if you see the
-invlpg instruction (or instructions _near_ it) show up high in
-profiles.  If you believe that individual invalidations being
-called too often, you can lower the tunable:
-
-	/sys/kernel/debug/x86/tlb_single_page_flush_ceiling
-
-This will cause us to do the global flush for more cases.
-Lowering it to 0 will disable the use of the individual flushes.
-Setting it to 1 is a very conservative setting and it should
-never need to be 0 under normal circumstances.
-
-Despite the fact that a single individual flush on x86 is
-guaranteed to flush a full 2MB [1], hugetlbfs always uses the full
-flushes.  THP is treated exactly the same as normal memory.
-
-You might see invlpg inside of flush_tlb_mm_range() show up in
-profiles, or you can use the trace_tlb_flush() tracepoints. to
-determine how long the flush operations are taking.
-
-Essentially, you are balancing the cycles you spend doing invlpg
-with the cycles that you spend refilling the TLB later.
-
-You can measure how expensive TLB refills are by using
-performance counters and 'perf stat', like this:
-
-perf stat -e
-	cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x84,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_duration/,
-	cpu/event=0x8,umask=0x82,name=dtlb_load_misses_walk_completed/,
-	cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x4,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_duration/,
-	cpu/event=0x49,umask=0x2,name=dtlb_store_misses_walk_completed/,
-	cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x4,name=itlb_misses_walk_duration/,
-	cpu/event=0x85,umask=0x2,name=itlb_misses_walk_completed/
-
-That works on an IvyBridge-era CPU (i5-3320M).  Different CPUs
-may have differently-named counters, but they should at least
-be there in some form.  You can use pmu-tools 'ocperf list'
-(https://github.com/andikleen/pmu-tools) to find the right
-counters for a given CPU.
-
-1. A footnote in Intel's SDM "4.10.4.2 Recommended Invalidation"
-   says: "One execution of INVLPG is sufficient even for a page
-   with size greater than 4 KBytes."