[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Message-ID: <20090430181546.GA7257@us.ibm.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 11:15:46 -0700
From: Gary Hade <garyhade@...ibm.com>
To: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>
Cc: Gary Hade <garyhade@...ibm.com>,
Yinghai Lu <yhlu.kernel@...il.com>, mingo@...e.hu,
mingo@...hat.com, tglx@...utronix.de, hpa@...or.com,
x86@...nel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, lcm@...ibm.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] [BUGFIX] x86/x86_64: fix IRQ migration triggered
active device IRQ interrruption
On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 10:46:29AM -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Gary Hade <garyhade@...ibm.com> writes:
>
> >> > This didn't help. Using 2.6.30-rc3 plus your patch both bugs
> >> > are unfortunately still present.
> >>
> >> You could offline the cpus? I know when I tested it on my
> >> laptop I could not offline the cpus.
> >
> > Eric, I'm sorry! This was due to my stupid mistake. When I
> > went to apply your patch I included --dry-run to test it but
> > apparently got distracted and never actually ran patch(1)
> > without --dry-run. <SIGH>
> >
> > So, I just rebuilt after _really_ applying the patch and got
> > the following result which probably to be what you intended.
>
> Ok. Good to see.
>
> >> >> I propose detecting thpe cases that we know are safe to migrate in
> >> >> process context, aka logical deliver with less than 8 cpus aka "flat"
> >> >> routing mode and modifying the code so that those work in process
> >> >> context and simply deny cpu hotplug in all of the rest of the cases.
> >> >
> >> > Humm, are you suggesting that CPU offlining/onlining would not
> >> > be possible at all on systems with >8 logical CPUs (i.e. most
> >> > of our systems) or would this just force users to separately
> >> > migrate IRQ affinities away from a CPU (e.g. by shutting down
> >> > the irqbalance daemon and writing to /proc/irq/<irq>/smp_affinity)
> >> > before attempting to offline it?
> >>
> >> A separate migration, for those hard to handle irqs.
> >>
> >> The newest systems have iommus that irqs go through or are using MSIs
> >> for the important irqs, and as such can be migrated in process
> >> context. So this is not a restriction for future systems.
> >
> > I understand your concerns but we need a solution for the
> > earlier systems that does NOT remove or cripple the existing
> > CPU hotplug functionality. If you can come up with a way to
> > retain CPU hotplug function while doing all IRQ migration in
> > interrupt context I would certainly be willing to try to find
> > some time to help test and debug your changes on our systems.
>
> Well that is ultimately what I am looking towards.
>
> How do we move to a system that works by design, instead of
> one with design goals that are completely conflicting.
>
> Thinking about it, we should be able to preemptively migrate
> irqs in the hook I am using that denies cpu hotplug.
>
> If they don't migrate after a short while I expect we should
> still fail but that would relieve some of the pain, and certainly
> prevent a non-working system.
>
> There are little bits we can tweak like special casing irqs that
> no-one is using.
>
> My preference here is that I would rather deny cpu hotplug unplug than
> have the non-working system problems that you have seen.
>
> All of that said I have some questions about your hardware.
> - How many sockets and how many cores do you have?
The largest is the x3950 M2 with up to 16 sockets and
96 cores in currently supported configurations and I
expect that there could be at least double those numbers
in the future.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/enterprise/x3950m2/index.html
> - How many irqs do you have?
On the single node x3950 M2 that I have been using with
all of it's 7 PCIe slots vacant I see:
[root@...3c160 ~]# cat /proc/interrupts | wc -l
21
Up to 4 nodes are currently supported and I expect
that there could be at least double that number in
the future.
> - Do you have an iommu that irqs can go through?
Only a subset of our systems (e.g. x460, x3850, x3950
w/Calgary iommu) have this.
>
> If you have <= 8 cores this problem is totally solvable.
Dreamer :-)
>
> Other cases may be but I don't know what the tradeoffs are.
> For very large systems we don't have enough irqs without
> limiting running in physical flat mode which makes things
> even more of a challenge.
>
> It may also be that your ioapics don't have the bugs that
> intel and amd ioapics have and we could have a way to recognize
> high quality ioapics.
I believe all our System x boxes have Intel and AMD ioapics.
Gary
--
Gary Hade
System x Enablement
IBM Linux Technology Center
503-578-4503 IBM T/L: 775-4503
garyhade@...ibm.com
http://www.ibm.com/linux/ltc
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
Powered by blists - more mailing lists