Date: Wed, 15 May 2013 11:02:34 +0200
From: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
To: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        mingo@elte.hu, laijs@cn.fujitsu.com, dipankar@in.ibm.com,
        akpm@linux-foundation.org, mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca,
        niv@us.ibm.com, tglx@linutronix.de, rostedt@goodmis.org,
        Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, dhowells@redhat.com, edumazet@google.com,
        darren@dvhart.com, fweisbec@gmail.com, sbw@mit.edu
Subject: Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 6/7] rcu: Drive quiescent-state-forcing
 delay from HZ
Message-ID: <20130515090234.GE10510@laptop.programming.kicks-ass.net>
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On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 10:56:39AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 08:47:28AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 04:51:20PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > > In theory, yes.  In practice, this requires lots of lock acquisitions
> > > > and releases on large systems, including some global locks.  The weight
> > > > could be reduced, but...
> > > > 
> > > > What I would like to do instead would be to specify expedited grace
> > > > periods during boot.
> > > 
> > > But why, surely going idle without any RCU callbacks isn't completely unheard
> > > of, even outside of the boot process?
> > 
> > Yep, and RCU has special-cased that for quite some time.
> > 
> > > Being able to quickly drop out of the RCU state machinery would be a good thing IMO.
> > 
> > And this is currently possible -- this is the job of rcu_idle_enter()
> > and friends.  And it works well, at least when I get my "if" statements
> > set up correctly (hence the earlier patch).
> > 
> > Or are you seeing a slowdown even with that earlier patch applied?  If so,
> > please let me know what you are seeing.
> 
> I'm not running anything in particular, except maybe a broken mental
> model of RCU ;-)
> 
> So what I'm talking about is the !rcu_cpu_has_callbacks() case, where
> there's absolutely nothing for RCU to do except tell the state machine
> its no longer participating.
> 
> Your patch to rcu_needs_cpu() frobbing the lazy condition is after that
> and thus irrelevant for this AFAICT.
> 
> Now as far as I can see, rcu_needs_cpu() will return false in this case;
> allowing the cpu to enter NO_HZ state. We then call rcu_idle_enter()
> which would call rcu_eqs_enter(). Which should put the CPU in extended
> quiescent state.
> 
> However, you're still running into these FQSs delaying boot. Why is
> that? Is that because rcu_eqs_enter() doesn't really do enough?
> 
> The thing is, if all other CPUs are idle, detecting the end of a grace
> period should be rather trivial and not involve FQSs and thus be tons
> faster.
> 
> Clearly I'm missing something obvious and not communicating right or so.

Earlier you said that improving EQS behaviour was expensive in that it
would require taking (global) locks or somesuch.

Would it not be possible to have the cpu performing a FQS finish this
work; that way the first FQS would be a little slow, but after that no
FQS would be needed anymore, right? Since we'd no longer require the
other CPUs to end a grace period.


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