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Message-Id: <1219677736.8515.69.camel@twins>
Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:22:16 +0200
From: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
To: paulmck@...ux.vnet.ibm.com
Cc: Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux-foundation.org>,
Pekka Enberg <penberg@...helsinki.fi>,
Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@...p.org>,
Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>,
Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
"Pallipadi, Venkatesh" <venkatesh.pallipadi@...el.com>,
Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@...el.com>,
Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@...cle.com>,
Rusty Russell <rusty@...tcorp.com.au>,
Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] smp_call_function: use rwlocks on queues rather
than rcu
On Mon, 2008-08-25 at 08:12 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 12:31:31PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 13:53 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 03:03:13PM -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
> > > > Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > I was indeed thinking in terms of the free from RCU being specially marked.
> > > >
> > > > Isnt there some way to shorten the rcu periods significantly? Critical
> > > > sections do not take that long after all.
> > >
> > > In theory, yes. However, the shorter the grace period, the greater the
> > > per-update overhead of grace-period detection -- the general approach
> > > is to use a per-CPU high-resolution timer to force RCU grace period
> > > processing every 100 microseconds or so.
> >
> > You could of course also drive the rcu state machine from
> > rcu_read_unlock().
>
> True, and Jim Houston implemented something similar to this some years
> back: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=109387402400673&w=2
>
> This of course greatly increases rcu_read_unlock() overhead. But
> perhaps it is a good implementation for the workloads that Christoph is
> thinking of.
>
> > > Also, by definition, the RCU
> > > grace period can be no shorter than the longest active RCU read-side
> > > critical section. Nevertheless, I have designed my current hierarchical
> > > RCU patch with expedited grace periods in mind, though more for the
> > > purpose of reducing latency of long strings of operations that involve
> > > synchronize_rcu() than for cache locality.
> >
> > Another thing that could be done is more often force a grace period by
> > flipping the counters.
>
> Yep. That is exactly what I was getting at with the high-resolution
> timer point above. This seems to be a reasonable compromise, as it
> allows someone to specify how quickly the grace periods happen
> dynamically.
>
> But I am not sure that this gets the grace periods to go fast enough to
> cover Christoph's use case -- he seems to be in a "faster is better"
> space rather than in an "at least this fast" space. Still, it would
> likely help in some important cases.
If we combine these two cases, and flip the counter as soon as we've
enqueued one callback, unless we're already waiting for a grace period
to end - which gives us a longer window to collect callbacks.
And then the rcu_read_unlock() can do:
if (dec_and_zero(my_counter) && my_index == dying)
raise_softirq(RCU)
to fire off the callback stuff.
/me ponders - there must be something wrong with that...
Aaah, yes, the dec_and_zero is non trivial due to the fact that its a
distributed counter. Bugger..
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