Re: Idle power fix regresses ebizzy performance (was 3.12-stablebackport of NUMA balancing patches)

From: Mike Galbraith
Date: Tue Jan 14 2014 - 03:24:36 EST


On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 09:01 +0100, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 02:31 -0500, Len Brown wrote:
> > > This is a false alarm.
> >
> > Thanks for the follow-up, Mel.
> >
> > Agreed, it makes no sense for ebizzy measure 'throughput', when a
> > library debug bottleneck
> > prevents it from scaling past 3% CPU utilization.
> >
> > Still, the broken configuration did find a difference due to the
> > addition of CLFLUSH on this box.
> > It makes me wonder if we will find issues on workloads that may depend
> > on the latency
> > of idle entry/exit, or perhaps sensitivity to the state of the cache
> > line containing thread_info->flags.
> >
> > If somebody runs into such a workload, please try changing this 1 line
> > of intel_idle.c to limit
> > the CLFLUSH to C-states deeper than C1E, and let me know what you see.
> >
> > - if (this_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_CLFLUSH_MONITOR))
> > + if ((eax > 1) && this_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_CLFLUSH_MONITOR))
> > clflush((void *)&current_thread_info()->flags);
>
> Hm, seems any high frequency switcher scheduling cross-core (pipe-test,
> or maybe a tbench pair) should show the cost to an affected box.

Oh yeah.. :) unless of course it's a Q6600 (poke poke).

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