Re: [PATCH 10/11] io_uring/rsrc: cache struct io_rsrc_node

Pavel Begunkov
2023-04-04T18:30:07Z

On 4/4/23 17:53, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi wrote:
> Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> writes:
>
>> On 4/4/23 9:48?AM, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi wrote:
>>> Pavel Begunkov <asml.silence@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> On 4/1/23 01:04, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi wrote:
>>>>> Pavel Begunkov <asml.silence@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>>>> I didn't try it, but kmem_cache vs kmalloc, IIRC, doesn't bring us
>>>>>> much, definitely doesn't spare from locking, and the overhead
>>>>>> definitely wasn't satisfactory for requests before.
>>>>> There is no locks in the fast path of slub, as far as I know. it has
>>>>> a
>>>>> per-cpu cache that is refilled once empty, quite similar to the fastpath
>>>>> of this cache. I imagine the performance hit in slub comes from the
>>>>> barrier and atomic operations?
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, I mean all kinds of synchronisation. And I don't think
>>>> that's the main offender here, the test is single threaded without
>>>> contention and the system was mostly idle.
>>>>
>>>>> kmem_cache works fine for most hot paths of the kernel. I think this
>>>>
>>>> It doesn't for io_uring. There are caches for the net side and now
>>>> in the block layer as well. I wouldn't say it necessarily halves
>>>> performance but definitely takes a share of CPU.
>>>
>>> Right. My point is that all these caches (block, io_uring) duplicate
>>> what the slab cache is meant to do. Since slab became a bottleneck, I'm
>>> looking at how to improve the situation on their side, to see if we can
>>> drop the caching here and in block/.
>>
>> That would certainly be a worthy goal, and I do agree that these caches
>> are (largely) working around deficiencies. One important point that you
>> may miss is that most of this caching gets its performance from both
>> avoiding atomics in slub, but also because we can guarantee that both
>> alloc and free happen from process context. The block IRQ bits are a bit
>> different, but apart from that, it's true elsewhere. Caching that needs
>> to even disable IRQs locally generally doesn't beat out slub by much,
>> the big wins are the cases where we know free+alloc is done in process
>> context.
>
> Yes, I noticed that. I was thinking of exposing a flag at kmem_cache
> creation-time to tell slab the user promises not to use it in IRQ
> context, so it doesn't need to worry about nested invocation in the
> allocation/free path. Then, for those caches, have a
> kmem_cache_alloc_locked variant, where the synchronization is maintained
> by the caller (i.e. by ->uring_lock here), so it can manipulate the
> cache without atomics.
>
> I was looking at your implementation of the block cache for inspiration
> and saw how you kept a second list for IRQ. I'm thinking how to fit a

It works fine, but one problem I had while implementing it is
local_irq_save() in bio_put_percpu_cache() not being so cheap even when
interrupts are already disabled. Apparently, raw_local_save_flags() is
not as free as I wished it to be, and we can't easily pass the current
context. Would be nice to do something about it at some point.

> similar change inside slub. But for now, I want to get the simpler
> case, which is all io_uring need.
>
> I'll try to get a prototype before lsfmm and see if I get the MM folks
> input there.
>

--
Pavel Begunkov