Re: [RFC PATCH v2] membarrier: expedited private command

[Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 1 Aug 2017 16:32:03 -0700
"Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 04:16:54PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 06:23:09AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:  
> > > On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 12:22:03PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > 
> > > [ . . . ]
> > >   
> > > > As to scheduler IPIs, those are limited to the CPUs the user is limited
> > > > to and are rate limited by the wakeup-latency of the tasks. After all,
> > > > all the time a task is runnable but not running, wakeups are no-ops.  
> > > 
> > > Can't that wakeup-latency limitation be overcome by a normal user simply
> > > by having lots of tasks to wake up, which then go back to sleep almost
> > > immediately?  Coupled with very a low-priority CPU-bound task on each CPU?  
> > 
> > Let me put it like this; there is no way to cause more interference
> > using IPIs then there is simply running while(1) loops ;-)  
> 
> Very good, that does give us some guidance, give or take context switches
> happening during the IPI latency window.  ;-)

I think we do have to be a bit careful. Peter's right when you're thinking
of just running arbitrary tasks on a single CPU, but for multiple CPUs, the
IPI sender will not necessarily get accounted the cost it incurs on the
target CPU.

So we do need to be careful about allowing a large amount of unprivileged
IPIs to arbitrary CPUs. Fortunately in this case the IPIs are restricted to
CPUs where our process is currently running. That's about the ideal case
where we're only disturbing our own job.

Thanks,
Nick