linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] /proc/stat: Reduce irqs counting performance overhead

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Message-ID: <f0ae7bd8-5c5b-aefd-aff8-2719fc0edbaa@redhat.com>
Date:   Wed, 9 Jan 2019 13:37:23 -0500
From:   Waiman Long <longman@...hat.com>
To:     Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@...il.com>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
        Davidlohr Bueso <dave@...olabs.net>,
        Miklos Szeredi <miklos@...redi.hu>,
        Daniel Colascione <dancol@...gle.com>,
        Dave Chinner <david@...morbit.com>,
        Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@...radead.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] /proc/stat: Reduce irqs counting performance
 overhead

On 01/09/2019 01:24 PM, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2019 at 01:03:33PM -0500, Waiman Long wrote:
>> The paragraph above may be a bit misleading. This v2 patch actually
>> touches very little on percpu accounting aspect of the IRQ counts. See
>> patches 2 and 3 for the relevant changes which is just a few line of new
>> codes. Please review the individual patches before Nak'ing.
>>
>> I could theoretically generalize them into a new set of percpu counting
>> helpers, but the idea behind it is quite different from the use cases of
>> percpu counter. So it may not be a good idea of adding it to there.
> Did you even try just using the general purpose infrastructure that's
> in place?  If that shows a performance problem _then_ it's time to make
> this special snowflake just a little more special.  Not before.

I have looked into the percpu counter code. There are two aspects that I
don't like to introduce to the interrupt handler's code path for
updating the counts.

1) There is a raw spinlock in the percpu_counter structure that may need
to be acquired in the update path. This can be a performance drag
especially if lockdep is enabled.

2) The percpu_counter structure is 40 bytes in size on 64-bit systems
compared with just 8 bytes for the percpu count pointer and an
additional 4 bytes that I introduced in patch 2. With thousands of irq
descriptors, it can consume quite a lot more memory. Memory consumption
was a point that you brought up in one of your previous mails.

Cheers,
Longman