Re: [RFC workqueue/driver-core PATCH 1/5] workqueue: Provide queue_work_near to queue work near a given NUMA node

Tejun Heo
2018-10-01T16:01:48Z

Hello,

On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 03:19:21PM -0700, Alexander Duyck wrote:
> On 9/26/2018 3:09 PM, Tejun Heo wrote:
> I could just use queue_work_on probably, but is there any issue if I
> am passing CPU values that are not in the wq_unbound_cpumask? That

That should be fine. If it can't find any available cpu, it'll fall
back to round-robin. We probably can improve it so that it can
consider the numa distance when falling back.

> was mostly my concern. Also for an unbound queue do I need to worry
> about the hotplug lock? I wasn't sure if that was the case or not as

Issuers don't need to worry about them.

> I know it is called out as something to be concerned with using
> queue_work_on, but in __queue_work the value is just used to
> determine which node to grab a work queue from.

It might be better to leave queue_work_on() to be used for per-cpu
workqueues and introduce queue_work_near() as you suggseted. I just
don't want it to duplicate the node selection code in it. Would that
work?

> I forgot to address your question about the advantages. They are
> pretty significant. The test system I was working with was
> initializing 3TB of nvdimm memory per node. If the node is aligned
> it takes something like 24 seconds, whereas an unaligned core can
> take 36 seconds or more.

Oh yeah, sure, numa affinity matters quite a bit on memory heavy
workloads. I was mistaken that you were adding adding numa affinity
to per-cpu workqueues.

Thanks.

--
tejun