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

From: Jeremy Fitzhardinge
Date: Sun Sep 28 2008 - 00:58:52 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * 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.
>

I've put that approach aside anyway, since I couldn't get it to work
after a day of fiddling and I didn't want to waste too much time on it.
I've just restricted myself to avoiding the normal interrupt delivery
path, and going direct from event channel to irq to desc->handler.

J
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