From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1760465Ab2D0PPs (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:15:48 -0400 Received: from e39.co.us.ibm.com ([32.97.110.160]:57540 "EHLO e39.co.us.ibm.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1760365Ab2D0PPr (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:15:47 -0400 Date: Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:15:18 -0700 From: "Paul E. McKenney" To: Mike Galbraith Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, mingo@elte.hu, laijs@cn.fujitsu.com, dipankar@in.ibm.com, akpm@linux-foundation.org, mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca, josh@joshtriplett.org, niv@us.ibm.com, tglx@linutronix.de, peterz@infradead.org, rostedt@goodmis.org, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, dhowells@redhat.com, eric.dumazet@gmail.com, darren@dvhart.com, fweisbec@gmail.com, patches@linaro.org Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC tip/core/rcu 6/6] rcu: Reduce cache-miss initialization latencies for large systems Message-ID: <20120427151518.GA2419@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reply-To: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com References: <20120423164159.GA13819@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1335199347-13926-1-git-send-email-paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1335199347-13926-6-git-send-email-paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> <1335501371.10374.30.camel@marge.simpson.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1335501371.10374.30.camel@marge.simpson.net> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) X-Content-Scanned: Fidelis XPS MAILER x-cbid: 12042715-4242-0000-0000-0000017A8813 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Fri, Apr 27, 2012 at 06:36:11AM +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote: > On Mon, 2012-04-23 at 09:42 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote: > > From: "Paul E. McKenney" > > > > Commit #0209f649 (rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout) set an upper > > limit of 16 on the leaf-level fanout for the rcu_node tree. This was > > needed to reduce lock contention that was induced by the synchronization > > of scheduling-clock interrupts, which was in turn needed to improve > > energy efficiency for moderate-sized lightly loaded servers. > > > > However, reducing the leaf-level fanout means that there are more > > leaf-level rcu_node structures in the tree, which in turn means that > > RCU's grace-period initialization incurs more cache misses. This is > > not a problem on moderate-sized servers with only a few tens of CPUs, > > With a distro config (4096 CPUs) interrupt latency is bad even on a > quad. Traversing empty nodes taking locks and cache misses hurts. Agreed -- and I will be working on an additional patch that makes RCU avoid initializing its data structures for CPUs that don't exist. That said, increasing the leaf-level fanout from 16 to 64 should reduce the latency pain by a factor of four. In addition, I would expect that real-time builds of the kernel would set NR_CPUS to some value much smaller than 4096. ;-) Thanx, Paul