[PATCH 0/2] arm64: Allow the rescheduling IPI to bypass irq_enter/exit

Marc Zyngier
2020-11-01T13:14:42Z

Vincent recently reported [1] that 5.10-rc1 showed a significant
regression when running "perf bench sched pipe" on arm64, and
pinpointed it to the recent move to handling IPIs as normal
interrupts.

The culprit is the use of irq_enter/irq_exit around the handling of
the rescheduling IPI, meaning that we enter the scheduler right after
the handling of the IPI instead of deferring it to the next preemption
event. This accounts for most of the overhead introduced.

On architectures that have architected IPIs at the CPU level (x86
being the obvious one), the absence of irq_enter/exit is natural. ARM
(both 32 and 64bits) mimicked this behaviour by having some
arch-specific handling for the interrupts that are used to implement
IPIs. Moving IPIs on the normal interrupt path introduced the
regression.

This couple of patches try to acknowledge the fact that some IPIs are
"special", in the sense that they don't need to follow the standard
interrupt handling flow.

The good news is that it cures the regression on arm64, and could
be similarly beneficial to both 32bit ARM, MIPS, or any other
architecture that uses a unique IRQ to represent the scheduler IPI.

The bad news is that these patches are ugly as sin, and I really don't
like them. I specially hate that they can give driver authors the idea
that they can make random interrupts "faster".

Comments, suggestions and hate mails appreciated, as always.

M.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/CAKfTPtDjPpri5Gt6kLeFp_B_zJUZ5DYXEqtJ+0VKohU-y9bFEQ@mail.gmail.com

Marc Zyngier (2):
genirq: Allow an interrupt to be marked as 'naked'
arm64: Mark the recheduling IPI as naked interrupt

arch/arm64/kernel/smp.c | 4 ++++
include/linux/irq.h | 4 +++-
kernel/irq/debugfs.c | 1 +
kernel/irq/irqdesc.c | 17 ++++++++++++-----
kernel/irq/settings.h | 7 +++++++
5 files changed, 27 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

--
2.28.0