Re: [RFC PATCH v2 11/12] x86/mm/tlb: Use async and inline messages for flushing

Andy Lutomirski
2019-06-07T16:42:19Z

On Jun 6, 2019, at 10:28 PM, Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com> wrote:

>> On May 31, 2019, at 3:07 PM, Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On May 31, 2019, at 2:47 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On May 31, 2019, at 2:33 PM, Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> On May 31, 2019, at 2:14 PM, Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 11:37 PM Nadav Amit <namit@vmware.com> wrote:
>>>>>> When we flush userspace mappings, we can defer the TLB flushes, as long
>>>>>> the following conditions are met:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 1. No tables are freed, since otherwise speculative page walks might
>>>>>> cause machine-checks.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> 2. No one would access userspace before flush takes place. Specifically,
>>>>>> NMI handlers and kprobes would avoid accessing userspace.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think I need to ask the big picture question. When someone calls
>>>>> flush_tlb_mm_range() (or the other entry points), if no page tables
>>>>> were freed, they want the guarantee that future accesses (initiated
>>>>> observably after the flush returns) will not use paging entries that
>>>>> were replaced by stores ordered before flush_tlb_mm_range(). We also
>>>>> need the guarantee that any effects from any memory access using the
>>>>> old paging entries will become globally visible before
>>>>> flush_tlb_mm_range().
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm wondering if receipt of an IPI is enough to guarantee any of this.
>>>>> If CPU 1 sets a dirty bit and CPU 2 writes to the APIC to send an IPI
>>>>> to CPU 1, at what point is CPU 2 guaranteed to be able to observe the
>>>>> dirty bit? An interrupt entry today is fully serializing by the time
>>>>> it finishes, but interrupt entries are epicly slow, and I don't know
>>>>> if the APIC waits long enough. Heck, what if IRQs are off on the
>>>>> remote CPU? There are a handful of places where we touch user memory
>>>>> with IRQs off, and it's (sadly) possible for user code to turn off
>>>>> IRQs with iopl().
>>>>>
>>>>> I *think* that Intel has stated recently that SMT siblings are
>>>>> guaranteed to stop speculating when you write to the APIC ICR to poke
>>>>> them, but SMT is very special.
>>>>>
>>>>> My general conclusion is that I think the code needs to document what
>>>>> is guaranteed and why.
>>>>
>>>> I think I might have managed to confuse you with a bug I made (last minute
>>>> bug when I was doing some cleanup). This bug does not affect the performance
>>>> much, but it might led you to think that I use the APIC sending as
>>>> synchronization.
>>>>
>>>> The idea is not for us to rely on write to ICR as something serializing. The
>>>> flow should be as follows:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> CPU0 CPU1
>>>>
>>>> flush_tlb_mm_range()
>>>> __smp_call_function_many()
>>>> [ prepare call_single_data (csd) ]
>>>> [ lock csd ]
>>>> [ send IPI ]
>>>> (*)
>>>> [ wait for csd to be unlocked ]
>>>> [ interrupt ]
>>>> [ copy csd info to stack ]
>>>> [ csd unlock ]
>>>> [ find csd is unlocked ]
>>>> [ continue (**) ]
>>>> [ flush TLB ]
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> At (**) the pages might be recycled, written-back to disk, etc. Note that
>>>> during (*), CPU0 might do some local TLB flushes, making it very likely that
>>>> CSD will be unlocked by the time it gets there.
>>>>
>>>> As you can see, I don’t rely on any special micro-architectural behavior.
>>>> The synchronization is done purely in software.
>>>>
>>>> Does it make more sense now?
>>>
>>> Yes. Have you benchmarked this?
>>
>> Partially. Numbers are indeed worse. Here are preliminary results, comparing
>> to v1 (concurrent):
>>
>> n_threads before concurrent +async
>> --------- ------ ---------- ------
>> 1 661 663 663
>> 2 1436 1225 (-14%) 1115 (-22%)
>> 4 1571 1421 (-10%) 1289 (-18%)
>>
>> Note that the benefit of “async" would be greater if the initiator does not
>> flush the TLB at all. This might happen in the case of kswapd, for example.
>> Let me try some micro-optimizations first, run more benchmarks and get back
>> to you.
>
> So I ran some more benchmarking (my benchmark is not very suitable), and tried
> more stuff that did not help (checking for more work before returning from the
> IPI handler, and avoid redundant IPIs in such case).
>
> Anyhow, with a fixed version, I ran a more standard benchmark on DAX:
>
> $ mkfs.ext4 /dev/pmem0
> $ mount -o dax /dev/pmem0 /mnt/mem
> $ cd /mnt/mem
> $ bash -c 'echo 0 > /sys/devices/platform/e820_pmem/ndbus0/region0/namespace0.0/block/pmem0/dax/write_cache’
> $ sysbench fileio --file-total-size=3G --file-test-mode=rndwr \
> --file-io-mode=mmap --threads=4 --file-fsync-mode=fdatasync prepare
> $ sysbench fileio --file-total-size=3G --file-test-mode=rndwr \
> --file-io-mode=mmap --threads=4 --file-fsync-mode=fdatasync run
>
> ( as you can see, I disabled the write-cache, since my machine does not have
> clwb/clflushopt and clflush appears to become a bottleneck otherwise )
>
>
> The results are:
> events (avg/stddev)
> -------------------
> base 1263689.0000/11481.10
> concurrent 1310123.5000/19205.79 (+3.6%)
> concurrent + async 1326750.2500/24563.61 (+4.9%)
>
> So which version do you want me to submit? With or without the async part?

I think it would be best to submit it without the async part. You can always submit that later.