Re: [lkp-robot] [fs] 3deb642f0d: will-it-scale.per_process_ops -8.8% regression

Christoph Hellwig
2018-06-22T09:46:48Z

On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 06:25:45PM +0900, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> What was the alleged advantage of the new poll methods again? Because
> it sure isn't obvious - not from the numbers, and not from the commit
> messages.

The primary goal is that we can implement a race-free aio poll,
the primary benefit is that we can get rid of the currently racy
and bug prone way we do in-kernel poll-like calls for things like
eventfd. The first is clearly is in 4.18-rc and provides massive
performance advantanges if used, the second is not there yet,
more on that below.

> I was assuming there was a good reason for it, but looking closer I
> see absolutely nothing but negatives. The argument that keyed wake-ups
> somehow make multiple wake-queues irrelevant doesn't hold water when
> the code is more complex and apparently slower. It's not like anybody
> ever *had* to use multiple wait-queues, but the old code was both
> simpler and cleaner and *allowed* you to use multiple queues if you
> wanted to.

It wasn't cleaner at all if you aren't poll or select, and even
for those it isn't exactly clean, see the whole mess around ->qproc.

> The disadvantages are obvious: every poll event now causes *two*
> indirect branches to the low-level filesystem or driver - one to get
> he poll head, and one to get the mask. Add to that all the new "do we
> have the new-style or old sane poll interface" tests, and poll is
> obviously more complicated.

It already caused two, and now we have three thanks to ->qproc. One
of the advantages of the new code is that we can eventually get rid
of ->qproc once all users of a non-default qproc are switched away
from vfs_poll. Which requires a little more work, but I have the
patches for that to be posted soon.

> If we could get the poll head by just having a direct pointer in the
> 'struct file', maybe that would be one thing. As it is, this all
> literally just adds overhead for no obvious reason. It replaced one
> simple direct call with two dependent but separate ones.

People are doing weird things with their poll heads, so we can't do
that unconditionally. We could however offer a waitqueue pointer
in struct file and most users would be very happy with that.

In the meantime below is an ugly patch that removes the _qproc
indirect for ->poll only (similar patch is possible for select
assuming the code uses select). And for next merge window I plan
to kill it off entirely.

How can we get this thrown into the will it scale run?

---
From 50ca47fdcfec0a1af56aac6db8a168bb678308a5 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 11:36:26 +0200
Subject: fs: optimize away ->_qproc indirection for poll_mask based polling

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
---
fs/select.c | 20 +++++++++++++++++++-
1 file changed, 19 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/fs/select.c b/fs/select.c
index bc3cc0f98896..54406e0ad23e 100644
--- a/fs/select.c
+++ b/fs/select.c
@@ -845,7 +845,25 @@ static inline __poll_t do_pollfd(struct pollfd *pollfd, poll_table *pwait,
/* userland u16 ->events contains POLL... bitmap */
filter = demangle_poll(pollfd->events) | EPOLLERR | EPOLLHUP;
pwait->_key = filter | busy_flag;
- mask = vfs_poll(f.file, pwait);
+ if (f.file->f_op->poll) {
+ mask = f.file->f_op->poll(f.file, pwait);
+ } else if (file_has_poll_mask(f.file)) {
+ struct wait_queue_head *head;
+
+ head = f.file->f_op->get_poll_head(f.file, pwait->_key);
+ if (!head) {
+ mask = DEFAULT_POLLMASK;
+ } else if (IS_ERR(head)) {
+ mask = EPOLLERR;
+ } else {
+ if (pwait->_qproc)
+ __pollwait(f.file, head, pwait);
+ mask = f.file->f_op->poll_mask(f.file, pwait->_key);
+ }
+ } else {
+ mask = DEFAULT_POLLMASK;
+ }
+
if (mask & busy_flag)
*can_busy_poll = true;
mask &= filter; /* Mask out unneeded events. */
--
2.17.1