netdev - Re: [RFC] net: remove busylock

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Date:	Thu, 19 May 2016 11:03:32 -0700
From:	Alexander Duyck <alexander.duyck@...il.com>
To:	Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com>
Cc:	netdev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
	Alexander Duyck <aduyck@...antis.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC] net: remove busylock

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 10:08 AM, Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@...il.com> wrote:
> busylock was added at the time we had expensive ticket spinlocks
>
> (commit 79640a4ca6955e3ebdb7038508fa7a0cd7fa5527 ("net: add additional
> lock to qdisc to increase throughput")
>
> Now kernel spinlocks are MCS, this busylock things is no longer
> relevant. It is slowing down things a bit.
>
>
> With HTB qdisc, here are the numbers for 200 concurrent TCP_RR, on a host with 48 hyperthreads.
>
> lpaa5:~# sar -n DEV 4 4 |grep eth0
> 10:05:44         eth0 798951.25 798951.75  52276.22  52275.26      0.00      0.00      0.50
> 10:05:48         eth0 798576.00 798572.75  52251.24  52250.39      0.00      0.00      0.75
> 10:05:52         eth0 798746.00 798748.75  52262.89  52262.13      0.00      0.00      0.50
> 10:05:56         eth0 798303.25 798291.50  52235.22  52233.10      0.00      0.00      0.50
> Average:         eth0 798644.12 798641.19  52256.39  52255.22      0.00      0.00      0.56
>
> Disabling busylock (by using a local sysctl)
>
> lpaa5:~# sar -n DEV 4 4 |grep eth0
> 10:05:14         eth0 864085.75 864091.50  56538.09  56537.46      0.00      0.00      0.50
> 10:05:18         eth0 864734.75 864729.25  56580.35  56579.05      0.00      0.00      0.75
> 10:05:22         eth0 864366.00 864361.50  56556.74  56555.00      0.00      0.00      0.50
> 10:05:26         eth0 864246.50 864248.75  56549.19  56547.65      0.00      0.00      0.50
> Average:         eth0 864358.25 864357.75  56556.09  56554.79      0.00      0.00      0.56
>
> That would be a 8 % increase.

The main point of the busy lock is to deal with the bulk throughput
case, not the latency case which would be relatively well behaved.
The problem wasn't really related to lock bouncing slowing things
down.  It was the fairness between the threads that was killing us
because the dequeue needs to have priority.

The main problem that the busy lock solved was the fact that you could
start a number of stream tests equal to the number of CPUs in a given
system and the result was that the performance would drop off a cliff
and you would drop almost all the packets for almost all the streams
because the qdisc never had a chance to drain because it would be CPU
- 1 enqueues, followed by 1 dequeue.

What we need if we are going to get rid of busy lock would be some
sort of priority locking mechanism that would allow the dequeue thread
to jump to the head of the line if it is attempting to take the lock.
Otherwise you end up spending all your time enqueuing packets into
oblivion because the qdiscs just overflow without the busy lock in
place.

- Alex