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Date:   Wed, 26 Apr 2023 14:55:04 -0700
From:   "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@kernel.org>
To:     Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc:     rcu@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        kernel-team@meta.com, rostedt@goodmis.org, riel@surriel.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC rcu] Stop rcu_tasks_invoke_cbs() from using
 never-online CPUs
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On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 11:31:00AM -1000, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Wed, Apr 26, 2023 at 02:17:03PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > But the idea here is to spread the load of queueing the work as well as
> > spreading the load of invoking the callbacks.
> > 
> > I suppose that I could allocate an array of ints, gather the online CPUs
> > into that array, and do a power-of-two distribution across that array.
> > But RCU Tasks allows CPUs to go offline with queued callbacks, so this
> > array would also need to include those CPUs as well as the ones that
> > are online.
> 
> Ah, I see, so it needs to make the distinction between cpus which have never
> been online and are currently offline but used to be online.

But only for as long as the used-to-be-online CPUs have callbacks for
the corresponding flavor of Tasks RCU.  :-/

> > Given that the common-case system has a dense cpus_online_mask, I opted
> > to keep it simple, which is optimal in the common case.
> > 
> > Or am I missing a trick here?
> 
> The worry is that on systems with actual CPU hotplugging, cpu_online_mask
> can be pretty sparse - e.g. 1/4 filled wouldn't be too out there. In such
> cases, the current code would end scheduling the work items on the issuing
> CPU (which is what WORK_CPU_UNBOUND does) 3/4 of the time which probably
> isn't the desired behavior.
> 
> So, I can initialize all per-cpu workqueues for all possible cpus on boot so
> that rcu doesn't have to worry about it but that would still have a similar
> problem of the callbacks not really being spread as intended.

Unless you get a few more users that care about this, it is probably
best to just let RCU deal with it.

For whatever it is worth, I am working a smaller patch that doesn't need
to do cpus_read_lock(), but anyone with short-term needs should stick
with the existing patch.

> I think it depends on how important it is to spread the callback workload
> evenly. If that matters quite a bit, it probably would make sense to
> maintain a cpumask for has-ever-been-online CPUs. Otherwise, do you think it
> can just use an unbound workqueue and forget about manually distributing the
> workload?

If there are not very many callbacks, then you are right that spreading
the load makes no sense.  And the 18-months-ago version of this code in
fact didn't bother spreading.  But new workloads came up that cared about
update-side performance and scalability, which led to the current code.

This code initially just invokes all the callbacks directly, just like
it did unconditionally 18 months ago, due to ->percpu_dequeue_lim being
initialized to 1.  This causes all the RCU Tasks callbacks to be queued
on CPU 0 and to be invoked directly by the grace-period kthread.

But if the call_rcu_tasks_*() code detects too much lock contention on
CPU 0's queue, which indicates that very large numbers of callbacks are
being queued, it switches to per-CPU mode.  In which case, we are likely
to have lots of callbacks on lots of queues, and in that case we really
want to invoke them concurrently.

Then if a later grace period finds that there are no more callbacks, it
switches back to CPU-0 mode.  So this extra workqueue overhead should
happen only on systems with sparse cpu_online_masks that are under heavy
call_rcu_tasks_*() load.

That is the theory, anyway!  ;-)

							Thanx, Paul