Re: [PATCH 1/3] sched/cputime: Improve scalability of times()/clock_gettime() on 32 bit cpus

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 11:27:42AM +0200, Stanislaw Gruszka wrote:
> My previous commit:
> 
>   a1eb1411b4e4 ("sched/cputime: Improve scalability by not accounting thread group tasks pending runtime")
> 
> helped to achieve good performance of SYS_times() and
> SYS_clock_gettimes(CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID) on 64 bit architectures.
> However taking task_rq_lock() when reading t->se.sum_exec_runtime on
> 32 bit architectures still make those syscalls slow.
> 
> The reason why we take the lock is to make 64bit sum_exec_runtime
> variable consistent. While a inconsistency scenario is very very unlike,
> I assume it still may happen at least on some 32 bit architectures.
> 
> To protect the variable I introduced new seqcount lock. Performance
> improvements on machine with 32 cores (32-bit cpus) measured by
> benchmarks described in commit:

No,.. running 32bit kernels on a machine with 32 cores is insane, full
stop.

You're now making rather hot paths slower to benefit a rather slow path,
that too is backwards.

[ also, seqcount is not a lock ].

Really, people should not expect process wide numbers to be fast.