Re: [PATCH 2/7] mm/page_alloc: Treat RT tasks similar to __GFP_HIGH

Mel Gorman
2023-01-13T11:14:25Z

On Fri, Jan 13, 2023 at 09:04:50AM +0000, David Laight wrote:
> From: Mel Gorman
> > Sent: 12 January 2023 09:36
> ...
> > Hard realtime tasks should be locking down resources in advance. Even a
> > soft-realtime task like audio or video live decoding which cannot jitter
> > should be allocating both memory and any disk space required up-front
> > before the recording starts instead of relying on reserves. At best,
> > reserve access will only delay the problem by a very short interval.
>
> Or, at least, ensuring the system isn't memory limited.
>

Added to changelog.

> The biggest effect on RT task latency/jitter (on a normal kernel)
> is hardware interrupt and softint code 'stealing' the cpu.
> The main 'culprit' being ethernet receive.
>
> Unfortunately if you are doing RTP audio (UDP data) you absolutely
> need the ethernet receive to run. When the softint code decides
> to drop back to a normal priority kernel worker thread packets
> get lost.
>

Yes, although this is a fundamental problem for background networking
processing in general IIUC that is independent of mm/. ksoftirqd may be
getting stalled behind a higher priority, a realtime task, a task that has
built a credit due to sleep time under GENTLE_FAIR_SLEEPERS relative to
ksoftirqd etc. As a normal low-priority CPU hog may be at the same priority
as ksoftirqd, it can use enough of the scheduler slice for the runqueue to
cause an indirect priority inversion if a high priority task is sleeping
waiting on network traffic it needs ASAP that's stalled on ksoftirqd. I
didn't check for other examples but the only one I'm aware of that boosts
ksoftirq priority is during rcutorture (see rcutorture_booster_init). A
quick glance doesn't show any possibility of boosting ksoftirqd priority
temporarily if dealing with NET_TX_SOFTIRQ although it might be an
interesting idea if it was demonstrated with a realistic (or at least
semi-realistic) test case that priority inversion can occur due to background
RX processing. It's not even PREEMPT_RT-specific, I suspect it's a general
problem. I don't think this series makes a difference because if any of
the critical tasks are depending on the memory reserves, they're already
in serious trouble.

> (I've been running 10000 RTP streams - with 10k receive UDP sockets.)
>

min_reserve access isn't going to fix any stalls with that volume of
streams :D

> So I doubt avoiding sleeps in kmalloc() is going to make a
> significant difference.
>

Agreed.

--
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs