Re: [PATCH v3 03/16] arm64: Allow IPIs to be handled as normal interrupts

From: Marc Zyngier
Date: Tue Oct 27 2020 - 06:38:09 EST


On 2020-10-27 10:12, Vincent Guittot wrote:
HI Marc,

On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 17:43, Vincent Guittot
<vincent.guittot@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Mon, 19 Oct 2020 at 15:04, Marc Zyngier <maz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>

...

> >>
> >> One of the major difference is that we end up, in some cases
> >> (such as when performing IRQ time accounting on the scheduler
> >> IPI), end up with nested irq_enter()/irq_exit() pairs.
> >> Other than the (relatively small) overhead, there should be
> >> no consequences to it (these pairs are designed to nest
> >> correctly, and the accounting shouldn't be off).
> >
> > While rebasing on mainline, I have faced a performance regression for
> > the benchmark:
> > perf bench sched pipe
> > on my arm64 dual quad core (hikey) and my 2 nodes x 112 CPUS (thx2)
> >
> > The regression comes from:
> > commit: d3afc7f12987 ("arm64: Allow IPIs to be handled as normal
> > interrupts")
>
> That's interesting, as this patch doesn't really change anything (most
> of the potential overhead comes in later). The only potential overhead
> I can see is that the scheduler_ipi() call is now wrapped around
> irq_enter()/irq_exit().
>
> >
> > v5.9 + this patch
> > hikey : 48818(+/- 0.31) 37503(+/- 0.15%) -23.2%
> > thx2 : 132410(+/- 1.72) 122646(+/- 1.92%) -7.4%
> >
> > By + this patch, I mean merging branch from this patch. Whereas
> > merging the previous:
> > commit: 83cfac95c018 ("genirq: Allow interrupts to be excluded from
> > /proc/interrupts")
> > It doesn't show any regression
>
> Since you are running perf, can you spot where the overhead occurs?

Any idea about the root cause of the regression ?
I have faced it on more arm64 platforms in the meantime

two possible causes:

(1) irq_enter/exit on the rescheduling IPI means we reschedule much more often
(2) irq_domain lookups add some overhead.

For (1), I have this series[1] which is ugly as sin and needs much more testing.

For (2), I have some ideas which need more work (let the irq domain resolve to
an irq_desc instead of an interrupt number, avoiding another radix-tree lookup).

M.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/maz/arm-platforms.git/log/?h=irq/ipi-fixes
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