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Christoph Lameter authored
vmstat workers are used for folding counter differentials into the zone, per node and global counters at certain time intervals. They currently run at defined intervals on all processors which will cause some holdoff for processors that need minimal intrusion by the OS. The current vmstat_update mechanism depends on a deferrable timer firing every other second by default which registers a work queue item that runs on the local CPU, with the result that we have 1 interrupt and one additional schedulable task on each CPU every 2 seconds If a workload indeed causes VM activity or multiple tasks are running on a CPU, then there are probably bigger issues to deal with. However, some workloads dedicate a CPU for a single CPU bound task. This is done in high performance computing, in high frequency financial applications, in networking (Intel DPDK, EZchip NPS) and with the advent of systems with more and more CPUs over time, this may become more and more common to do since when one has enough CPUs one cares less about efficiently sharing a CPU with other tasks and more about efficiently monopolizing a CPU per task. The difference of having this timer firing and workqueue kernel thread scheduled per second can be enormous. An artificial test measuring the worst case time to do a simple "i++" in an endless loop on a bare metal system and under Linux on an isolated CPU with dynticks and with and without this patch, have Linux match the bare metal performance (~700 cycles) with this patch and loose by couple of orders of magnitude (~200k cycles) without it[*]. The loss occurs for something that just calculates statistics. For networking applications, for example, this could be the difference between dropping packets or sustaining line rate. Statistics are important and useful, but it would be great if there would be a way to not cause statistics gathering produce a huge performance difference. This patche does just that. This patch creates a vmstat shepherd worker that monitors the per cpu differentials on all processors. If there are differentials on a processor then a vmstat worker local to the processors with the differentials is created. That worker will then start folding the diffs in regular intervals. Should the worker find that there is no work to be done then it will make the shepherd worker monitor the differentials again. With this patch it is possible then to have periods longer than 2 seconds without any OS event on a "cpu" (hardware thread). The patch shows a very minor increased in system performance. hackbench -s 512 -l 2000 -g 15 -f 25 -P Results before the patch: Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks) Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes Time: 4.992 Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks) Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes Time: 4.971 Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks) Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes Time: 5.063 Hackbench after the patch: Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks) Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes Time: 4.973 Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks) Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes Time: 4.990 Running in process mode with 15 groups using 50 file descriptors each (== 750 tasks) Each sender will pass 2000 messages of 512 bytes Time: 4.993 [fengguang.wu@intel.com: cpu_stat_off can be static] Signed-off-by:
Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com> Reviewed-by:
Gilad Ben-Yossef <gilad@benyossef.com> Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Cc: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org> Cc: Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org> Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@gmail.com> Cc: Hakan Akkan <hakanakkan@gmail.com> Cc: Max Krasnyansky <maxk@qti.qualcomm.com> Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org> Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Signed-off-by:
Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@intel.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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