Comment by VorpalWay
9 hours ago
> So to be honest I don't see the merit of this study. This study is essentially how fast is your interconnect so it can survive bad software that allowed to run untrammelled.
It seems like a worthwhile study if you want to know what CPU to buy to play specific old games that use bus locks. Games that will never be fixed.
It seemed to me that the issue with the games was that they did split locks at all, and when Linux detected that and descheduled the process, performance was trash. I didn't think they were doing frequent split locks that resulted in bad performance by itself.
You don't need to be a careful shopper for this; just turn off detection while you're playing these games, or tune the punishment algorithm, or patch the game. Just because the developer won't doesn't mean you can't; there's plenty of 3rd party binary patches for games.
> It seems like a worthwhile study if you want to know what CPU to buy to play specific old games that use bus locks. Games that will never be fixed.
Fair.
> old games that use bus locks
Yes the bus locks here are unintentional since LOCK on cache line is not sufficient, the CPU falls back to locking the bus.