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    rcu: Use softirq to address performance regression · 09223371
    Shaohua Li 提交于
    Commit a26ac245(rcu: move TREE_RCU from softirq to kthread)
    introduced performance regression. In an AIM7 test, this commit degraded
    performance by about 40%.
    
    The commit runs rcu callbacks in a kthread instead of softirq. We observed
    high rate of context switch which is caused by this. Out test system has
    64 CPUs and HZ is 1000, so we saw more than 64k context switch per second
    which is caused by RCU's per-CPU kthread.  A trace showed that most of
    the time the RCU per-CPU kthread doesn't actually handle any callbacks,
    but instead just does a very small amount of work handling grace periods.
    This means that RCU's per-CPU kthreads are making the scheduler do quite
    a bit of work in order to allow a very small amount of RCU-related
    processing to be done.
    
    Alex Shi's analysis determined that this slowdown is due to lock
    contention within the scheduler.  Unfortunately, as Peter Zijlstra points
    out, the scheduler's real-time semantics require global action, which
    means that this contention is inherent in real-time scheduling.  (Yes,
    perhaps someone will come up with a workaround -- otherwise, -rt is not
    going to do well on large SMP systems -- but this patch will work around
    this issue in the meantime.  And "the meantime" might well be forever.)
    
    This patch therefore re-introduces softirq processing to RCU, but only
    for core RCU work.  RCU callbacks are still executed in kthread context,
    so that only a small amount of RCU work runs in softirq context in the
    common case.  This should minimize ksoftirqd execution, allowing us to
    skip boosting of ksoftirqd for CONFIG_RCU_BOOST=y kernels.
    Signed-off-by: NShaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com>
    Tested-by: N"Alex,Shi" <alex.shi@intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: NPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    09223371
irq.h 3.4 KB