Re: [PATCH] softirq: let ksoftirqd do its job

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 10:42:29 -0700

> From: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
> 
> A while back, Paolo and Hannes sent an RFC patch adding threaded-able
> napi poll loop support : (https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/620657/) 
> 
> The problem seems to be that softirqs are very aggressive and are often
> handled by the current process, even if we are under stress and that
> ksoftirqd was scheduled, so that innocent threads would have more chance
> to make progress.
> 
> This patch makes sure that if ksoftirq is running, we let it
> perform the softirq work.
> 
> Jonathan Corbet summarized the issue in https://lwn.net/Articles/687617/
> 
> Tested:
> 
>  - NIC receiving traffic handled by CPU 0
>  - UDP receiver running on CPU 0, using a single UDP socket.
>  - Incoming flood of UDP packets targeting the UDP socket.
> 
> Before the patch, the UDP receiver could almost never get cpu cycles and
> could only receive ~2,000 packets per second.
> 
> After the patch, cpu cycles are split 50/50 between user application and
> ksoftirqd/0, and we can effectively read ~900,000 packets per second,
> a huge improvement in DOS situation. (Note that more packets are now
> dropped by the NIC itself, since the BH handlers get less cpu cycles to
> drain RX ring buffer)
> 
> Since the load runs in well identified threads context, an admin can
> more easily tune process scheduling parameters if needed.
> 
> Reported-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>
> Reported-by: Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@stressinduktion.org>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>

I'm just kind of assuming this won't go through my tree, but I can take
it if that's what everyone agrees to.