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

[Andy Lutomirski]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Fam Zheng <famz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 01/08 09:57, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> 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.
>
> This sounds good to me.
>
>>
>>  - timerfd_settime actions: this allows a single syscall to wait and
>> adjust *both* monotonic and real-time wakeups.
>
> I'm not sure, doesn't this break orthogonality between epoll and timerfd?

Yes.  It's not very elegant, and more elegant ideas are welcome.

>
>>
>> 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);
>
> What about flags?
>

No room.  Maybe it should just be a struct for everything instead of
separate args.

> Fam



-- 
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC
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