Re: [RFC PATCH 12/20] kthread: Implement preferred affinity

[Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>]

Le Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 05:49:51PM +0200, Vlastimil Babka a écrit :
> Acked-by: Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@suse.cz>
> 
> Nit:
> 
> > +int kthread_affine_preferred(struct task_struct *p, const struct cpumask *mask)
> > +{
> > +	struct kthread *kthread = to_kthread(p);
> > +	cpumask_var_t affinity;
> > +	unsigned long flags;
> > +	int ret;
> > +
> > +	if (!wait_task_inactive(p, TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE) || kthread->started) {
> > +		WARN_ON(1);
> > +		return -EINVAL;
> > +	}
> > +
> 
> Should we also fail if kthread->preferred_affinity already exist? In
> case somebody calls this twice.

Good point!

> 
> Also for some of the use cases (kswapd, kcompactd) it would make sense
> to be able to add cpus of a node as they are onlined. Which seems we
> didn't do, except some corner case handling in kcompactd, but maybe we
> should? I wonder if the current implementation of onlining a completely
> new node with cpus does the right thing as a result of the individual
> onlining operations, or we end up with being affined to a single cpu (or
> none).
> 
> But that would need some kind of kthread_affine_preferred_update()
> implementation?

So you mean that the "for_each_node_state()" loop in kcompactd doesn't
handle all possible nodes but only those online when it's called? Or
am I confused?

If all users of preferred affinity were to use NUMA nodes, it could be
a good idea to do a flavour of kernel/smpboot.c which would handle
per-node kthreads instead of per-cpu kthreads. I initially thought
about that. It would have handled all the lifecycle of those kthreads,
including creation, against hotplug. Unfortunately RCU doesn't rely on
per-NUMA nodes but rather use its own tree.

If there be more users of real per NUMA nodes kthreads than kswapd and
kcompactd, of course that would be much worth considering.

Thanks.