# Per-switch cost — N=1 local profile (spike findings)

Measured with `benches/switch_cost.rs` (local mode: one actor, one scheduler,
tight `yield_now()` loop = one park/unpark round-trip with no IO/channel/timer
and no cross-core traffic). Sandbox: 1 core, kernel 6.18, **no PMU** (hardware
counters unavailable), so attribution is from `perf record -e task-clock`
(software timer sampling) plus the bench's own rdtsc/wall brackets.

> **Provenance (post-excision).** This profile was captured against the
> spin-enabled build (the pre-excision HEAD, with the RFC 004 spinning workers
> live in `src/runtime.rs`). The RFC 004 spinning experiment has since been
> excised from `master`; idle schedulers are back to the historical
> `thread::sleep` wait. The `futex_wake` attribution below therefore reflects
> spinning machinery that is **no longer present on current master** — see the
> per-row and per-finding notes. The shim, `schedule_loop`, and run-queue
> findings are spin-independent and remain valid.

## Numbers (stable across runs)

- Round-trip p50 ≈ **303 ns ≈ 828 cyc** (instrumentation floor subtracted).
- Derived effective clock ≈ **2.73 GHz** (rdtsc cyc / wall ns — the two lenses
  corroborate, so the cycle counts are trustworthy).
- p90 316 ns, p99 472 ns; max is a multi-ms OS-deschedule outlier (1 shared
  core) — ignore the max, trust the percentiles (the harness pools them).

## Attribution (perf task-clock, self-time, 28.6k samples / 12M round-trips)

| share | symbol | bucket |
|------:|--------|--------|
| 24.8% | `runtime::schedule_loop` | scheduler logic (slot-word/epoch + dispatch) |
|  8.6% | `MutexQueue::push`/`pop`/`len` | run-queue ops |
| ~12%  | `do_syscall_64`+`syscall`+`futex_*` | **futex_wake on the hot path** — spinning submit-rule wake; removed by the RFC 004 excision (not on current master) |
|  3.5% | `IoThread::drain_completions` | the always-on IO thread (`run()` starts one) |
| ~30%  | `main` + `clock_gettime`/Timespec + `quicksort` | **instrumentation** (timing + percentile sort) |
|  ~1%  | `switch_to_scheduler`+`switch_to_actor_asm`+ sp accessors | **the context shims + TLS** |

## Headline finding — revises the handoff hypothesis

The handoff named the **context shims** (`context.rs`: two `call`s into the
TLS sp accessors per switch) as the prime suspect for the per-switch cost.
**At N=1 that is not where the time goes — the shims + TLS are ~1% of
self-time.** The N=1 cost is dominated by:

1. **`schedule_loop` + run-queue ops (~33%)** — the epoch/slot-word transition
   and the mutex run-queue push/pop on every re-queue.
2. **A `futex_wake` syscall (~12%)** fired on the hot path even though nothing
   was parked. This was the spinning **submit-rule wake** introduced by the RFC
   004 experiment — a parallelism/latency optimisation, not a liveness guard. In
   a single-scheduler always-runnable loop it was pure cost (no one was ever
   parked to wake). The RFC 004 excision removed this wake with the rest of the
   spinning machinery: on current master idle schedulers use `thread::sleep`
   again, so the N=1 hot path no longer makes this syscall.

## What this does and does NOT show

- The handoff's shim hypothesis was a **many-core** hypothesis: its evidence was
  the N=1→N=8 jump (0.18→1.2µs), attributed to TLS access mode (`__tls_get_addr`
  vs `#[thread_local]`) and cross-core coherency on the sp/epoch words. **None of
  that is observable at N=1 on one core.** This profile does NOT refute it; it
  establishes that the shim is cheap *until cores contend*.
- So the spike question sharpens into two separable costs:
  - **N=1 floor:** scheduler logic (`schedule_loop` + run-queue ops). The
    futex_wake component was spinning machinery and is gone post-excision, so the
    remaining N=1 floor is the scheduler core itself.
  - **N→8 slope:** the shim/TLS/coherency cost. Needs the many-core box + a
    `remote` bench mode (wake straddling two schedulers) + hardware PMU counters
    (cache-misses, `MEM_LOAD…HITM` for coherency) — none available in this sandbox.

## Reproduce

```sh
. "$HOME/.cargo/env"
cargo build --release --bench switch_cost
BIN=$(ls -t target/release/deps/switch_cost-* | grep -v '\.d$' | head -1)
PERF=/usr/lib/linux-tools-6.8.0-124/perf   # 6.8 perf on 6.18 kernel; sw events only here

# bench alone (numbers):
SMARM_SWITCH_ROUNDS=3000000 SMARM_SWITCH_WARMUP=50000 SMARM_SWITCH_RUNS=4 "$BIN"

# attribution (sw task-clock; HW counters need a real PMU / the 5900X):
SMARM_SWITCH_ROUNDS=3000000 "$PERF" record -F 4000 -g --call-graph fp -o /tmp/switch.data -- "$BIN"
"$PERF" report -i /tmp/switch.data --stdio --no-children
```

On the 5900X with a real PMU, drop `-e task-clock` for `-e cycles,instructions,
cache-misses,mem_load_retired.l3_miss` to get the coherency picture the N=8 case
needs.