Moving quiescent-state forcing into a kthread dispenses with the need
for the ->n_rp_need_fqs field, so this commit removes it.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Because newly offlined CPUs continue executing after completing the
CPU_DYING notifiers, they legitimately enter the scheduler and use
RCU while appearing to be offline. This calls for a more sophisticated
approach as follows:
1. RCU marks the CPU online during the CPU_UP_PREPARE phase.
2. RCU marks the CPU offline during the CPU_DEAD phase.
3. Diagnostics regarding use of read-side RCU by offline CPUs use
RCU's accounting rather than the cpu_online_map. (Note that
__call_rcu() still uses cpu_online_map to detect illegal
invocations within CPU_DYING notifiers.)
4. Offline CPUs are prevented from hanging the system by
force_quiescent_state(), which pays attention to cpu_online_map.
Some additional work (in a later commit) will be needed to
guarantee that force_quiescent_state() waits a full jiffy before
assuming that a CPU is offline, for example, when called from
idle entry. (This commit also makes the one-jiffy wait
explicit, since the old-style implicit wait can now be defeated
by RCU_FAST_NO_HZ and by rcutorture.)
This approach avoids the false positives encountered when attempting to
use more exact classification of CPU online/offline state.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Earlier versions of RCU used the scheduling-clock tick to detect idleness
by checking for the idle task, but handled idleness differently for
CONFIG_NO_HZ=y. But there are now a number of uses of RCU read-side
critical sections in the idle task, for example, for tracing. A more
fine-grained detection of idleness is therefore required.
This commit presses the old dyntick-idle code into full-time service,
so that rcu_idle_enter(), previously known as rcu_enter_nohz(), is
always invoked at the beginning of an idle loop iteration. Similarly,
rcu_idle_exit(), previously known as rcu_exit_nohz(), is always invoked
at the end of an idle-loop iteration. This allows the idle task to
use RCU everywhere except between consecutive rcu_idle_enter() and
rcu_idle_exit() calls, in turn allowing architecture maintainers to
specify exactly where in the idle loop that RCU may be used.
Because some of the userspace upcall uses can result in what looks
to RCU like half of an interrupt, it is not possible to expect that
the irq_enter() and irq_exit() hooks will give exact counts. This
patch therefore expands the ->dynticks_nesting counter to 64 bits
and uses two separate bitfields to count process/idle transitions
and interrupt entry/exit transitions. It is presumed that userspace
upcalls do not happen in the idle loop or from usermode execution
(though usermode might do a system call that results in an upcall).
The counter is hard-reset on each process/idle transition, which
avoids the interrupt entry/exit error from accumulating. Overflow
is avoided by the 64-bitness of the ->dyntick_nesting counter.
This commit also adds warnings if a non-idle task asks RCU to enter
idle state (and these checks will need some adjustment before applying
Frederic's OS-jitter patches (http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/10/7/246).
In addition, validation of ->dynticks and ->dynticks_nesting is added.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
There is often a delay between the time that a CPU passes through a
quiescent state and the time that this quiescent state is reported to the
RCU core. It is quite possible that the grace period ended before the
quiescent state could be reported, for example, some other CPU might have
deduced that this CPU passed through dyntick-idle mode. It is critically
important that quiescent state be counted only against the grace period
that was in effect at the time that the quiescent state was detected.
Previously, this was handled by recording the number of the last grace
period to complete when passing through a quiescent state. The RCU
core then checks this number against the current value, and rejects
the quiescent state if there is a mismatch. However, one additional
possibility must be accounted for, namely that the quiescent state was
recorded after the prior grace period completed but before the current
grace period started. In this case, the RCU core must reject the
quiescent state, but the recorded number will match. This is handled
when the CPU becomes aware of a new grace period -- at that point,
it invalidates any prior quiescent state.
This works, but is a bit indirect. The new approach records the current
grace period, and the RCU core checks to see (1) that this is still the
current grace period and (2) that this grace period has not yet ended.
This approach simplifies reasoning about correctness, and this commit
changes over to this new approach.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Call out the RCU_TRACE information that is provided only in kernels
built with RCU_BOOST.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
(Note: this was reverted, and is now being re-applied in pieces, with
this being the fifth and final piece. See below for the reason that
it is now felt to be safe to re-apply this.)
Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb()
invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but
sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes
them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds
a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to
rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the
compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based
critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not
entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view.
In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact
that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could
be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference
across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the
addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has
the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the
functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope
that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but
some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications
can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.)
This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock
acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in
deadlock. The proof is as follows:
1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of
its leaf rcu_node's lock.
2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the
last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the
->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only
after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this
lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf
node's lock.
3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure.
Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through
this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock
must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node.
4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state
structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node
hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code
preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical
section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a
memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates
preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened
before the update of ->completed.
5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp()
will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf
rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock.
If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation
will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was
set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still
seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity.
6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes
aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes
any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible
for invocation.
If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace
period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy,
we will still be in the single critical section. In this case,
the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will
be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state.
On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire
the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after
each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period.
On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory
barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp().
The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to
reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick
per CPU to once per grace period.
This was reverted do to hangs found during testing by Yinghai Lu and
Ingo Molnar. Frederic Weisbecker supplied Yinghai with tracing that
located the underlying problem, and Frederic also provided the fix.
The underlying problem was that the HARDIRQ_ENTER() macro from
lib/locking-selftest.c invoked irq_enter(), which in turn invokes
rcu_irq_enter(), but HARDIRQ_EXIT() invoked __irq_exit(), which
does not invoke rcu_irq_exit(). This situation resulted in calls
to rcu_irq_enter() that were not balanced by the required calls to
rcu_irq_exit(). Therefore, after these locking selftests completed,
RCU's dyntick-idle nesting count was a large number (for example,
72), which caused RCU to to conclude that the affected CPU was not in
dyntick-idle mode when in fact it was.
RCU would therefore incorrectly wait for this dyntick-idle CPU, resulting
in hangs.
In contrast, with Frederic's patch, which replaces the irq_enter()
in HARDIRQ_ENTER() with an __irq_enter(), these tests don't ever call
either rcu_irq_enter() or rcu_irq_exit(), which works because the CPU
running the test is already marked as not being in dyntick-idle mode.
This means that the rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() calls and RCU
then has no problem working out which CPUs are in dyntick-idle mode and
which are not.
The reason that the imbalance was not noticed before the barrier patch
was applied is that the old implementation of rcu_enter_nohz() ignored
the nesting depth. This could still result in delays, but much shorter
ones. Whenever there was a delay, RCU would IPI the CPU with the
unbalanced nesting level, which would eventually result in rcu_enter_nohz()
being called, which in turn would force RCU to see that the CPU was in
dyntick-idle mode.
The reason that very few people noticed the problem is that the mismatched
irq_enter() vs. __irq_exit() occured only when the kernel was built with
CONFIG_DEBUG_LOCKING_API_SELFTESTS.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
This reverts commit e59fb3120b.
This reversion was due to (extreme) boot-time slowdowns on SPARC seen by
Yinghai Lu and on x86 by Ingo
.
This is a non-trivial reversion due to intervening commits.
Conflicts:
Documentation/RCU/trace.txt
kernel/rcutree.c
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Increment a per-CPU counter on each pass through rcu_cpu_kthread()'s
service loop, and add it to the rcudata trace output.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
This commit adds the age in jiffies of the current grace period along
with the duration in jiffies of the longest grace period since boot
to the rcu/rcugp debugfs file. It also adds an additional "O" state
to kthread tracing to differentiate between the kthread waiting due to
having nothing to do on the one hand and waiting due to being on the
wrong CPU on the other hand.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
This commit documents the new debugfs rcu/rcutorture and rcu/rcuboost
trace files. The description has been updated as suggested by Josh
Triplett.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
This commit adds an indication of the state of the callback queue using
a string of four characters following the "ql=" integer queue length.
The first character is "N" if there are callbacks that have been
queued that are not yet ready to be handled by the next grace period, or
"." otherwise. The second character is "R" if there are callbacks queued
that are ready to be handled by the next grace period, or "." otherwise.
The third character is "W" if there are callbacks waiting for the current
grace period, or "." otherwise. Finally, the fourth character is "D"
if there are callbacks that have been handled by a prior grace period
and are waiting to be invoked, or ".".
Note that callbacks that are in the process of being invoked are
not shown. These callbacks would have been removed from the rcu_data
structure's list by rcu_do_batch() prior to being executed. (These
callbacks are also not reflected in the "ql=" total, FWIW.)
Also, document the new callback-queue trace information.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
The trace.txt file had obsolete output for the debugfs rcu/rcudata
file, so update it.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Combine the current TREE_PREEMPT_RCU ->blocked_tasks[] lists in the
rcu_node structure into a single ->blkd_tasks list with ->gp_tasks
and ->exp_tasks tail pointers. This is in preparation for RCU priority
boosting, which will add a third dimension to the combinatorial explosion
in the ->blocked_tasks[] case, but simply a third pointer in the new
->blkd_tasks case.
Also update documentation to reflect blocked_tasks[] merge
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Commit d09b62d fixed grace-period synchronization, but left some smp_mb()
invocations in rcu_process_callbacks() that are no longer needed, but
sheer paranoia prevented them from being removed. This commit removes
them and provides a proof of correctness in their absence. It also adds
a memory barrier to rcu_report_qs_rsp() immediately before the update to
rsp->completed in order to handle the theoretical possibility that the
compiler or CPU might move massive quantities of code into a lock-based
critical section. This also proves that the sheer paranoia was not
entirely unjustified, at least from a theoretical point of view.
In addition, the old dyntick-idle synchronization depended on the fact
that grace periods were many milliseconds in duration, so that it could
be assumed that no dyntick-idle CPU could reorder a memory reference
across an entire grace period. Unfortunately for this design, the
addition of expedited grace periods breaks this assumption, which has
the unfortunate side-effect of requiring atomic operations in the
functions that track dyntick-idle state for RCU. (There is some hope
that the algorithms used in user-level RCU might be applied here, but
some work is required to handle the NMIs that user-space applications
can happily ignore. For the short term, better safe than sorry.)
This proof assumes that neither compiler nor CPU will allow a lock
acquisition and release to be reordered, as doing so can result in
deadlock. The proof is as follows:
1. A given CPU declares a quiescent state under the protection of
its leaf rcu_node's lock.
2. If there is more than one level of rcu_node hierarchy, the
last CPU to declare a quiescent state will also acquire the
->lock of the next rcu_node up in the hierarchy, but only
after releasing the lower level's lock. The acquisition of this
lock clearly cannot occur prior to the acquisition of the leaf
node's lock.
3. Step 2 repeats until we reach the root rcu_node structure.
Please note again that only one lock is held at a time through
this process. The acquisition of the root rcu_node's ->lock
must occur after the release of that of the leaf rcu_node.
4. At this point, we set the ->completed field in the rcu_state
structure in rcu_report_qs_rsp(). However, if the rcu_node
hierarchy contains only one rcu_node, then in theory the code
preceding the quiescent state could leak into the critical
section. We therefore precede the update of ->completed with a
memory barrier. All CPUs will therefore agree that any updates
preceding any report of a quiescent state will have happened
before the update of ->completed.
5. Regardless of whether a new grace period is needed, rcu_start_gp()
will propagate the new value of ->completed to all of the leaf
rcu_node structures, under the protection of each rcu_node's ->lock.
If a new grace period is needed immediately, this propagation
will occur in the same critical section that ->completed was
set in, but courtesy of the memory barrier in #4 above, is still
seen to follow any pre-quiescent-state activity.
6. When a given CPU invokes __rcu_process_gp_end(), it becomes
aware of the end of the old grace period and therefore makes
any RCU callbacks that were waiting on that grace period eligible
for invocation.
If this CPU is the same one that detected the end of the grace
period, and if there is but a single rcu_node in the hierarchy,
we will still be in the single critical section. In this case,
the memory barrier in step #4 guarantees that all callbacks will
be seen to execute after each CPU's quiescent state.
On the other hand, if this is a different CPU, it will acquire
the leaf rcu_node's ->lock, and will again be serialized after
each CPU's quiescent state for the old grace period.
On the strength of this proof, this commit therefore removes the memory
barriers from rcu_process_callbacks() and adds one to rcu_report_qs_rsp().
The effect is to reduce the number of memory barriers by one and to
reduce the frequency of execution from about once per scheduling tick
per CPU to once per grace period.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Lai's RCU-callback immediate-adoption patch changes the RCU tracing
output, so update tracing.txt. Also update a few comments to clarify
the synchronization design.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Add the required verbiage to Documentation/RCU/trace.txt.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
The current tracing data is not sufficient to deduce the average time
that a callback spends waiting for a grace period to end. Add three
per-CPU counters recording the number of callbacks invoked (ci), the
number of callbacks orphaned (co), and the number of callbacks adopted
(ca). Given the existing callback queue length (ql), the average wait
time in absence of CPU hotplug operations is ql/ci. The units of wait
time will be in terms of the duration over which ci was measured.
In the presence of CPU hotplug operations, there is room for argument,
but ql/(ci-co+ca) won't steer you too far wrong.
Also fixes a typo called out by Lucas De Marchi <lucas.de.marchi@gmail.com>.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Lai Jiangshan noted that up to 10% of the RCU_SOFTIRQ are spurious, and
traced this down to the fact that the current grace-period machinery
will uselessly raise RCU_SOFTIRQ when a given CPU needs to go through
a quiescent state, but has not yet done so. In this situation, there
might well be nothing that RCU_SOFTIRQ can do, and the overhead can be
worth worrying about in the ksoftirqd case. This patch therefore avoids
raising RCU_SOFTIRQ in this situation.
Changes since v1 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/3/30/122 from Lai Jiangshan):
o Omit the rcu_qs_pending() prechecks, as they aren't that
much less expensive than the quiescent-state checks.
o Merge with the set_need_resched() patch that reduces IPIs.
o Add the new n_rp_report_qs field to the rcu_pending tracing output.
o Update the tracing documentation accordingly.
Signed-off-by: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
This patch fixes a long-standing performance bug in classic RCU that
results in massive internal-to-RCU lock contention on systems with
more than a few hundred CPUs. Although this patch creates a separate
flavor of RCU for ease of review and patch maintenance, it is intended
to replace classic RCU.
This patch still handles stress better than does mainline, so I am still
calling it ready for inclusion. This patch is against the -tip tree.
Nevertheless, experience on an actual 1000+ CPU machine would still be
most welcome.
Most of the changes noted below were found while creating an rcutiny
(which should permit ejecting the current rcuclassic) and while doing
detailed line-by-line documentation.
Updates from v9 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/2/334):
o Fixes from remainder of line-by-line code walkthrough,
including comment spelling, initialization, undesirable
narrowing due to type conversion, removing redundant memory
barriers, removing redundant local-variable initialization,
and removing redundant local variables.
I do not believe that any of these fixes address the CPU-hotplug
issues that Andi Kleen was seeing, but please do give it a whirl
in case the machine is smarter than I am.
A writeup from the walkthrough may be found at the following
URL, in case you are suffering from terminal insomnia or
masochism:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/tmp/rcutree-walkthrough.2008.12.16a.pdf
o Made rcutree tracing use seq_file, as suggested some time
ago by Lai Jiangshan.
o Added a .csv variant of the rcudata debugfs trace file, to allow
people having thousands of CPUs to drop the data into
a spreadsheet. Tested with oocalc and gnumeric. Updated
documentation to suit.
Updates from v8 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/15/139):
o Fix a theoretical race between grace-period initialization and
force_quiescent_state() that could occur if more than three
jiffies were required to carry out the grace-period
initialization. Which it might, if you had enough CPUs.
o Apply Ingo's printk-standardization patch.
o Substitute local variables for repeated accesses to global
variables.
o Fix comment misspellings and redundant (but harmless) increments
of ->n_rcu_pending (this latter after having explicitly added it).
o Apply checkpatch fixes.
Updates from v7 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/10/291):
o Fixed a number of problems noted by Gautham Shenoy, including
the cpu-stall-detection bug that he was having difficulty
convincing me was real. ;-)
o Changed cpu-stall detection to wait for ten seconds rather than
three in order to reduce false positive, as suggested by Ingo
Molnar.
o Produced a design document (http://lwn.net/Articles/305782/).
The act of writing this document uncovered a number of both
theoretical and "here and now" bugs as noted below.
o Fix dynticks_nesting accounting confusion, simplify WARN_ON()
condition, fix kerneldoc comments, and add memory barriers
in dynticks interface functions.
o Add more data to tracing.
o Remove unused "rcu_barrier" field from rcu_data structure.
o Count calls to rcu_pending() from scheduling-clock interrupt
to use as a surrogate timebase should jiffies stop counting.
o Fix a theoretical race between force_quiescent_state() and
grace-period initialization. Yes, initialization does have to
go on for some jiffies for this race to occur, but given enough
CPUs...
Updates from v6 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/23/448):
o Fix a number of checkpatch.pl complaints.
o Apply review comments from Ingo Molnar and Lai Jiangshan
on the stall-detection code.
o Fix several bugs in !CONFIG_SMP builds.
o Fix a misspelled config-parameter name so that RCU now announces
at boot time if stall detection is configured.
o Run tests on numerous combinations of configurations parameters,
which after the fixes above, now build and run correctly.
Updates from v5 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/15/92, bad subject line):
o Fix a compiler error in the !CONFIG_FANOUT_EXACT case (blew a
changeset some time ago, and finally got around to retesting
this option).
o Fix some tracing bugs in rcupreempt that caused incorrect
totals to be printed.
o I now test with a more brutal random-selection online/offline
script (attached). Probably more brutal than it needs to be
on the people reading it as well, but so it goes.
o A number of optimizations and usability improvements:
o Make rcu_pending() ignore the grace-period timeout when
there is no grace period in progress.
o Make force_quiescent_state() avoid going for a global
lock in the case where there is no grace period in
progress.
o Rearrange struct fields to improve struct layout.
o Make call_rcu() initiate a grace period if RCU was
idle, rather than waiting for the next scheduling
clock interrupt.
o Invoke rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() only when
idle, as suggested by Andi Kleen. I still don't
completely trust this change, and might back it out.
o Make CONFIG_RCU_TRACE be the single config variable
manipulated for all forms of RCU, instead of the prior
confusion.
o Document tracing files and formats for both rcupreempt
and rcutree.
Updates from v4 for those missing v5 given its bad subject line:
o Separated dynticks interface so that NMIs and irqs call separate
functions, greatly simplifying it. In particular, this code
no longer requires a proof of correctness. ;-)
o Separated dynticks state out into its own per-CPU structure,
avoiding the duplicated accounting.
o The case where a dynticks-idle CPU runs an irq handler that
invokes call_rcu() is now correctly handled, forcing that CPU
out of dynticks-idle mode.
o Review comments have been applied (thank you all!!!).
For but one example, fixed the dynticks-ordering issue that
Manfred pointed out, saving me much debugging. ;-)
o Adjusted rcuclassic and rcupreempt to handle dynticks changes.
Attached is an updated patch to Classic RCU that applies a hierarchy,
greatly reducing the contention on the top-level lock for large machines.
This passes 10-hour concurrent rcutorture and online-offline testing on
128-CPU ppc64 without dynticks enabled, and exposes some timekeeping
bugs in presence of dynticks (exciting working on a system where
"sleep 1" hangs until interrupted...), which were fixed in the
2.6.27 kernel. It is getting more reliable than mainline by some
measures, so the next version will be against -tip for inclusion.
See also Manfred Spraul's recent patches (or his earlier work from
2004 at http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=108546384711797&w=2).
We will converge onto a common patch in the fullness of time, but are
currently exploring different regions of the design space. That said,
I have already gratefully stolen quite a few of Manfred's ideas.
This patch provides CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT, which controls the bushiness
of the RCU hierarchy. Defaults to 32 on 32-bit machines and 64 on
64-bit machines. If CONFIG_NR_CPUS is less than CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT,
there is no hierarchy. By default, the RCU initialization code will
adjust CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT to balance the hierarchy, so strongly NUMA
architectures may choose to set CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_EXACT to disable
this balancing, allowing the hierarchy to be exactly aligned to the
underlying hardware. Up to two levels of hierarchy are permitted
(in addition to the root node), allowing up to 16,384 CPUs on 32-bit
systems and up to 262,144 CPUs on 64-bit systems. I just know that I
am going to regret saying this, but this seems more than sufficient
for the foreseeable future. (Some architectures might wish to set
CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT=4, which would limit such architectures to 64 CPUs.
If this becomes a real problem, additional levels can be added, but I
doubt that it will make a significant difference on real hardware.)
In the common case, a given CPU will manipulate its private rcu_data
structure and the rcu_node structure that it shares with its immediate
neighbors. This can reduce both lock and memory contention by multiple
orders of magnitude, which should eliminate the need for the strange
manipulations that are reported to be required when running Linux on
very large systems.
Some shortcomings:
o More bugs will probably surface as a result of an ongoing
line-by-line code inspection.
Patches will be provided as required.
o There are probably hangs, rcutorture failures, &c. Seems
quite stable on a 128-CPU machine, but that is kind of small
compared to 4096 CPUs. However, seems to do better than
mainline.
Patches will be provided as required.
o The memory footprint of this version is several KB larger
than rcuclassic.
A separate UP-only rcutiny patch will be provided, which will
reduce the memory footprint significantly, even compared
to the old rcuclassic. One such patch passes light testing,
and has a memory footprint smaller even than rcuclassic.
Initial reaction from various embedded guys was "it is not
worth it", so am putting it aside.
Credits:
o Manfred Spraul for ideas, review comments, and bugs spotted,
as well as some good friendly competition. ;-)
o Josh Triplett, Ingo Molnar, Peter Zijlstra, Mathieu Desnoyers,
Lai Jiangshan, Andi Kleen, Andy Whitcroft, and Andrew Morton
for reviews and comments.
o Thomas Gleixner for much-needed help with some timer issues
(see patches below).
o Jon M. Tollefson, Tim Pepper, Andrew Theurer, Jose R. Santos,
Andy Whitcroft, Darrick Wong, Nishanth Aravamudan, Anton
Blanchard, Dave Kleikamp, and Nathan Lynch for keeping machines
alive despite my heavy abuse^Wtesting.
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
