Message-ID: <1515734588.10188.36.camel@gmx.de>
Subject: Re: [RFC 1/2] softirq: Defer net rx/tx processing to ksoftirqd
 context
From: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Dmitry Safonov <dima@arista.com>,
        Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Dmitry Safonov <0x7f454c46@gmail.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>,
        Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
        Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@stressinduktion.org>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        "Levin, Alexander (Sasha Levin)" <alexander.levin@verizon.com>,
        Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>,
        "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
        Radu Rendec <rrendec@arista.com>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>,
        Stanislaw Gruszka <sgruszka@redhat.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Wanpeng Li <wanpeng.li@hotmail.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2018 06:23:08 +0100
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On Thu, 2018-01-11 at 12:22 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 12:16 PM, Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com> wrote:
> >
> > Note that when I implemented TCP Small queues, I did experiments between
> > using a work queue or a tasklet, and workqueues added unacceptable P99
> > latencies, when many user threads are competing with kernel threads.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> So I think one solution might be to have a hybrid system, where we do
> the softirq's synchronously normally (which is what you really want
> for good latency).
> 
> But then fall down on a threaded model - but that fallback case should
> be per-softirq, not global. So if one softirq uses a lot of CPU time,
> that shouldn't affect the latency of other softirqs.
> 
> So maybe we could get rid of the per-cpu ksoftirqd entirely, and
> replace it with with per-cpu and per-softirq workqueues?

How would that be better than what RT used to do, and I still do for my
RT kernels via boot option, namely split ksoftirqd into per-softirq
threads.

	-Mike