Re: [PATCH 0/3] epoll: Add epoll_pwait1 syscall

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 1:12 AM, Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 2015-01-08 at 16:25 +0800, Fam Zheng wrote:
>> Applications could use epoll interface when then need to poll a big number of
>> files in their main loops, to achieve better performance than ppoll(2). Except
>> for one concern: epoll only takes timeout parameters in microseconds, rather
>> than nanoseconds.
>>
>> That is a drawback we should address. For a real case in QEMU, we run into a
>> scalability issue with ppoll(2) when many devices are attached to guest, in
>> which case many host fds, such as virtual disk images and sockets, need to be
>> polled by the main loop. As a result we are looking at switching to epoll, but
>> the coarse timeout precision is a trouble, as explained below.
>>
>> We're already using prctl(PR_SET_TIMERSLACK, 1) which is necessary to implement
>> timers in the main loop; and we call ppoll(2) with the next firing timer as
>> timeout, so when ppoll(2) returns, we know that we have more work to do (either
>> handling IO events, or fire a timer callback). This is natual and efficient,
>> except that ppoll(2) itself is slow.
>>
>> Now that we want to switch to epoll, to speed up the polling. However the timer
>> slack setting will be effectively undone, because that way we will have to
>> round up the timeout to microseconds honoring timer contract. But consequently,
>> this hurts the general responsiveness.
>>
>> Note: there are two alternatives, without changing kernel:
>>
>> 1) Leading ppoll(2), with the epollfd only and a nanosecond timeout. It won't
>> be slow as one fd is polled. No more scalability issue. And if there are
>> events, we know from ppoll(2)'s return, then we do the epoll_wait(2) with
>> timeout=0; otherwise, there can't be events for the epoll, skip the following
>> epoll_wait and just continue with other work.
>>
>> 2) Setup and add a timerfd to epoll, then we do epoll_wait(..., timeout=-1).
>> The timerfd will hopefully force epoll_wait to return when it timeouts, even if
>> no other events have arrived. This will inheritly give us timerfd's precision.
>> Note that for each poll, the desired timeout is different because the next
>> timer is different, so that, before each epoll_wait(2), there will be a
>> timerfd_settime syscall to set it to a proper value.
>>
>> Unfortunately, both approaches require one more syscall per iteration, compared
>> to the original single ppoll(2), cost of which is unneglectable when we talk
>> about nanosecond granularity.

I'd like to see a more ambitious change, since the timer isn't the
only problem like this.  Specifically, I'd like a syscall that does a
list of epoll-related things and then waits.  The list of things could
include, at least:

 - EPOLL_CTL_MOD actions: level-triggered epoll users are likely to
want to turn on and off their requests for events on a somewhat
regular basis.

 - timerfd_settime actions: this allows a single syscall to wait and
adjust *both* monotonic and real-time wakeups.

Would this make sense?  It could look like:

int epoll_mod_and_pwait(int epfd,
  struct epoll_event *events, int maxevents,
  struct epoll_command *commands, int ncommands,
  const sigset_t *sigmask);

--Andy
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