Re: Should irq_chip->mask disable percpu interrupts to all cpus,or just to this cpu?

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Sat Sep 27 2008 - 15:44:49 EST



* Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@xxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > I found handle_percpu_irq() which addresses my concerns. It doesn't
> > attempt to mask the interrupt, takes no locks, and doesn't set or test
> > IRQ_INPROGRESS in desc->status, so it will scale perfectly across
> > multiple cpus. It makes no changes to the desc structure, so there
> > isn't even any cacheline bouncing.
>
> kstat_irqs. Is arguably part of the irq structure.
> And kstat_irqs is a major pain in my book.
>
> And for a rare event you have a cacheline read.
> I don't think we are quite there yet but we really want to allocate
> irq_desc on the right NUMA node in a multi socket system, to reduce
> the cache miss times.

note that we already do _almost_ that in tip/irq/sparseirq. dyn_array[]
will extend itself in a NUMA-aware fashion. (normal device irq_desc
entries will be allocated via kmalloc)

what would be needed is to deallocate/reallocate irq_desc when the IRQ
affinity is changed? (i.e. when a device is migrated to a specific NUMA
node)

> Is it a big deal? Probably not. But I think it would be a bad idea
> to increasingly use infrastructure that will make it hard to optimize
> the code.
>
> Especially since the common case in high performance drivers is going
> to be, individually routable irq sources. Having one queue per cpu
> and one irq per queue. Which sounds like the same case you have.

agreed - the kstat_irqs cacheline bounce would show up in Xen benchmarks
i'm sure.

Ingo
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