Re: perf: odd event scheduling issue

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 09:00:57AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 11:07:09PM -0400, Vince Weaver wrote:
> > Hello
> > 
> > so I'm running 4.1-rc4 on my Haswell machine and a lot of my perf_event 
> > testsuite is failing.  There seems to be weird event scheduling issues.
> > 
> > I can reproduce it with plain perf; simple event groups that should work 
> > fine can't be scheduled.
> > 
> > vince@haswell:~$ perf stat -e \{cycles,instructions\} sleep 1
> > 
> 
> Hmm indeed, my ivb-ep does the same thing. Lemme go poke at that.

I've gotta go pick the kid up from school, but the bisect just finished
and threw up the below commit.

I'll go stare at it in an hour or so.

---

c02cdbf60b51b8d98a49185535f5d527a2965142 is the first bad commit
commit c02cdbf60b51b8d98a49185535f5d527a2965142
Author: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
Date:   Mon Nov 17 20:07:02 2014 +0100

    perf/x86/intel: Limit to half counters when the HT workaround is enabled, to avoid exclusive mode starvation
    
    This patch limits the number of counters available to each CPU when
    the HT bug workaround is enabled.
    
    This is necessary to avoid situation of counter starvation. Such can
    arise from configuration where one HT thread, HT0, is using all 4 counters
    with corrupting events which require exclusion the the sibling HT, HT1.
    
    In such case, HT1 would not be able to schedule any event until HT0
    is done. To mitigate this problem, this patch artificially limits
    the number of counters to 2.
    
    That way, we can gurantee that at least 2 counters are not in exclusive
    mode and therefore allow the sibling thread to schedule events of the
    same type (system vs. per-thread). The 2 counters are not determined
    in advance. We simply set the limit to two events per HT.
    
    This helps mitigate starvation in case of events with specific counter
    constraints such a PREC_DIST.
    
    Note that this does not elimintate the starvation is all cases. But
    it is better than not having it.
    
    (Solution suggested by Peter Zjilstra.)
    
    Signed-off-by: Stephane Eranian <eranian@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: bp@alien8.de
    Cc: jolsa@redhat.com
    Cc: kan.liang@intel.com
    Cc: maria.n.dimakopoulou@gmail.com
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1416251225-17721-11-git-send-email-eranian@google.com
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

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