Re: [PATCH RFC] sched/core: Make idle_cpu return 0 if doing softirq work

[Hillf Danton]

Hi Jonathan

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 12:56 AM, Jonathan Davies
<jonathan.davies@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> On 18/07/14 15:08, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 01:59:06PM +0100, Jonathan Davies wrote:
>>>
>>> The current implementation of idle_cpu only considers tasks that might be
>>> in the
>>> CPU's runqueue. If there's nothing in the specified CPU's runqueue, it
>>> will
>>> return 1. But if the CPU is doing work in the softirq context, it is
>>> wrong for
>>> idle_cpu to return 1. This patch makes it return 0.
>>>
>>> I observed this to be a problem with a device driver kicking a kthread by
>>> executing wake_up from softirq context. The Completely Fair Scheduler's
>>> select_task_rq_fair was looking for an "idle sibling" of the CPU
>>> executing it by
>>> calling select_idle_sibling, passing the executing CPU as the 'target'
>>> parameter. The first thing that select_idle_sibling does is to check
>>> whether the
>>> 'target' CPU is idle, using idle_cpu, and to return that CPU if so.
>>> Despite the
>>> executing CPU being busy in softirq context, idle_cpu was returning 1,
>>> meaning
>>> that the scheduler would consistently try to run the kthread on the same
>>> CPU as
>>> the kick came from. Given that the softirq work was on-going, this led to
>>> a
>>> multi-millisecond delay before the scheduler eventually realised it
>>> should
>>> migrate the kthread to a different CPU.
>>
>>
>> If your softirq takes _that_ long its broken anyhow.
>
>
> Modern NICs can sustain 40 Gb/s of traffic. For network device drivers that
> use NAPI, polling is done in softirq context. At this data-rate, the
> per-packet processing overhead means means that a lot of CPU time is spent
> in softirq.
>
Perhaps fcoe_percpu_receive_thread (linux/drivers/scsi/fcoe/fcoe.c)
can help you.

Hillf
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/