[PATCH v4 00/26] arm64: provide pseudo NMI with GICv3

[julien.thierry@arm.com (Julien Thierry)]

Hi Daniel,

On 20/07/18 16:09, Daniel Thompson wrote:
> On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 10:49:06AM +0100, Julien Thierry wrote:
>> This series is a continuation of the work started by Daniel [1]. The goal
>> is to use GICv3 interrupt priorities to simulate an NMI.
>>
>> To achieve this, set two priorities, one for standard interrupts and
>> another, higher priority, for NMIs. Whenever we want to disable interrupts,
>> we mask the standard priority instead so NMIs can still be raised. Some
>> corner cases though still require to actually mask all interrupts
>> effectively disabling the NMI.
>>
>> Currently, only PPIs and SPIs can be set as NMIs. IPIs being currently
>> hardcoded IRQ numbers, there isn't a generic interface to set SGIs as NMI
>> for now. I don't think there is any reason LPIs should be allowed to be set
>> as NMI as they do not have an active state.
>> When an NMI is active on a CPU, no other NMI can be triggered on the CPU.
>>
>> After the big refactoring I get performances similar to the ones I had
>> in v3[2], reposting old results here:
>>
>> - "hackbench 200 process 1000" (average over 20 runs)
>> +-----------+----------+------------+------------------+
>> |           | native   | PMR guest  | v4.17-rc6 guest  |
>> +-----------+----------+------------+------------------+
>> | PMR host  | 40.0336s |   39.3039s |         39.2044s |
>> | v4.17-rc6 | 40.4040s |   39.6011s |         39.1147s |
>> +-----------+----------+------------+------------------+
>>
>> - Kernel build from defconfig:
>> PMR host:  13m45.743s
>> v4.17-rc6: 13m40.400s
>>
>> I'll try to post more detailed benchmarks later if I find notable
>> differences with the previous version.
> 
> So... I'm rather late sharing these benchmarks but...
> 
> I ran some kernel build benchmarks on the Developerbox from 96Boards
> (aka Synquacer E-series by Socionext): 24 C-A53 cores running at 1GHz.
> This is obviously a real workload and one that anything called
> Developerbox needs to care about!
> 
> The difference in performance is slight but PMR based locking is
> marginally slower than using the I-bit. It varies with the
> parrallel-ness of the build slightly but the slowdown on this platform
> is between 0.2% and 0.6% [1].
> 
> This delta was sufficiently small that I was willing to leave the PMR
> masking in place for a fair amount of my day to day work. On that basis
> these patches could also be described as:
> 
> Tested-by: Daniel Thompson <daniel.thompson@linaro.org>
> 

Thanks very much for doing this testing. Things have changed a bit in 
the NMI side of the series and I am trying to get a saner API to get 
upstreamed before posting a new version of these patches. But the PMR 
masking/unmasking remains the same so the benchmarks should still be 
valid in the future version.

Thanks,

> 
> Daniel.
> 
> 
> [1] For anyone interested in the raw numbers then the spreadsheet where
>      I checked the results is here:
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gGxAJd_gL-HjeTF-x0Ut5lWT4JULNRDeTbPvPInZ4H4/edit?usp=sharing
> 

-- 
Julien Thierry