linux-kernel - [PATCH 0/3] IPI: Avoid to use 2 cache lines for one call_single

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Date:   Wed,  2 Aug 2017 16:52:17 +0800
From:   "Huang, Ying" <ying.huang@...el.com>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>,
        Christoph Lameter <cl@...ux.com>,
        Joerg Roedel <joro@...tes.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
        Michael Ellerman <mpe@...erman.id.au>,
        Borislav Petkov <bp@...e.de>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        Juergen Gross <jgross@...e.com>, Aaron Lu <aaron.lu@...el.com>,
        Huang Ying <ying.huang@...el.com>
Subject: [PATCH 0/3] IPI: Avoid to use 2 cache lines for one call_single_data

From: Huang Ying <ying.huang@...el.com>

struct call_single_data is used in IPI to transfer information between
CPUs.  Its size is bigger than sizeof(unsigned long) and less than
cache line size.  Now, it is allocated with no any alignment
requirement.  This makes it possible for allocated call_single_data to
cross 2 cache lines.  So that double the number of the cache lines
that need to be transferred among CPUs.  This is resolved by aligning
the allocated call_single_data with cache line size.

To allocate cache line size aligned percpu memory dynamically,
alloc_percpu_aligned() is introduced and used in iova drivers too.

To test the effect of the patch, we use the vm-scalability multiple
thread swap test case (swap-w-seq-mt).  The test will create multiple
threads and each thread will eat memory until all RAM and part of swap
is used, so that huge number of IPI will be triggered when unmapping
memory.  In the test, the throughput of memory writing improves ~5%
compared with misaligned call_single_data because of faster IPI.

Best Regards,
Huang, Ying