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authorShaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>2011-06-14 13:26:25 +0800
committerPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>2011-06-14 15:25:39 -0700
commit09223371deac67d08ca0b70bd18787920284c967 (patch)
tree0ad0354a93ac209c8cfd2b79d03d0462aa3c5c58 /kernel/rcutree.h
parent9a432736904d386cda28b987b38ba14dae960ecc (diff)
rcu: Use softirq to address performance regression
Commit a26ac2455ffcf3(rcu: move TREE_RCU from softirq to kthread) introduced performance regression. In an AIM7 test, this commit degraded performance by about 40%. The commit runs rcu callbacks in a kthread instead of softirq. We observed high rate of context switch which is caused by this. Out test system has 64 CPUs and HZ is 1000, so we saw more than 64k context switch per second which is caused by RCU's per-CPU kthread. A trace showed that most of the time the RCU per-CPU kthread doesn't actually handle any callbacks, but instead just does a very small amount of work handling grace periods. This means that RCU's per-CPU kthreads are making the scheduler do quite a bit of work in order to allow a very small amount of RCU-related processing to be done. Alex Shi's analysis determined that this slowdown is due to lock contention within the scheduler. Unfortunately, as Peter Zijlstra points out, the scheduler's real-time semantics require global action, which means that this contention is inherent in real-time scheduling. (Yes, perhaps someone will come up with a workaround -- otherwise, -rt is not going to do well on large SMP systems -- but this patch will work around this issue in the meantime. And "the meantime" might well be forever.) This patch therefore re-introduces softirq processing to RCU, but only for core RCU work. RCU callbacks are still executed in kthread context, so that only a small amount of RCU work runs in softirq context in the common case. This should minimize ksoftirqd execution, allowing us to skip boosting of ksoftirqd for CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y kernels. Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> Tested-by: "Alex,Shi" <alex.shi@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'kernel/rcutree.h')
-rw-r--r--kernel/rcutree.h1
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/kernel/rcutree.h b/kernel/rcutree.h
index 7b9a08b4aae..0fed6b934d2 100644
--- a/kernel/rcutree.h
+++ b/kernel/rcutree.h
@@ -439,6 +439,7 @@ static void rcu_preempt_offline_cpu(int cpu);
#endif /* #ifdef CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU */
static void rcu_preempt_check_callbacks(int cpu);
static void rcu_preempt_process_callbacks(void);
+static void rcu_preempt_do_callbacks(void);
void call_rcu(struct rcu_head *head, void (*func)(struct rcu_head *rcu));
#if defined(CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU) || defined(CONFIG_TREE_PREEMPT_RCU)
static void rcu_report_exp_rnp(struct rcu_state *rsp, struct rcu_node *rnp);