Re: [PATCH RFC tip/core/rcu] Parallelize and economize NOCB kthread wakeups

Paul E. McKenney
2014-07-02T15:48:30Z

On Wed, Jul 02, 2014 at 02:34:12PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 07:20:38AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > An 80-CPU system with a context-switch-heavy workload can require so
> > many NOCB kthread wakeups that the RCU grace-period kthreads spend several
> > tens of percent of a CPU just awakening things. This clearly will not
> > scale well: If you add enough CPUs, the RCU grace-period kthreads would
> > get behind, increasing grace-period latency.
> >
> > To avoid this problem, this commit divides the NOCB kthreads into leaders
> > and followers, where the grace-period kthreads awaken the leaders each of
> > whom in turn awakens its followers. By default, the number of groups of
> > kthreads is the square root of the number of CPUs, but this default may
> > be overridden using the rcutree.rcu_nocb_leader_stride boot parameter.
> > This reduces the number of wakeups done per grace period by the RCU
> > grace-period kthread by the square root of the number of CPUs, but of
> > course by shifting those wakeups to the leaders. In addition, because
> > the leaders do grace periods on behalf of their respective followers,
> > the number of wakeups of the followers decreases by up to a factor of two.
> > Instead of being awakened once when new callbacks arrive and again
> > at the end of the grace period, the followers are awakened only at
> > the end of the grace period.
> >
> > For a numerical example, in a 4096-CPU system, the grace-period kthread
> > would awaken 64 leaders, each of which would awaken its 63 followers
> > at the end of the grace period. This compares favorably with the 79
> > wakeups for the grace-period kthread on an 80-CPU system.
>
> Urgh, how about we kill the entire nocb nonsense and try again? This is
> getting quite rediculous.

Sure thing, Peter.

Thanx, Paul