Re: [PATCH 1/2] perf/x86/intel: enable CPU ref_cycles for GP counter

[Stephane Eranian]

On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 9:28 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 06:51:28AM -0700, Andi Kleen wrote:
>> On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 11:25:23AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>> > On Sun, May 28, 2017 at 01:31:09PM -0700, Stephane Eranian wrote:
>> > > Ultimately, I would like to see the watchdog move out of the PMU. That
>> > > is the only sensible solution.
>> > > You just need a resource able to interrupt on NMI or you handle
>> > > interrupt masking in software as has
>> > > been proposed on LKML.
>> >
>> > So even if we do the soft masking, we still need to deal with regions
>> > where the interrupts are disabled. Once an interrupt hits the soft mask
>> > we still hardware mask.
>> >
>> > So to get full and reliable coverage we still need an NMI source.
>>
>> You would only need a single one per system however, not one per CPU.
>> RCU already tracks all the CPUs, all we need is a single NMI watchdog
>> that makes sure RCU itself does not get stuck.
>>
>> So we just have to find a single watchdog somewhere that can trigger
>> NMI.
>
> But then you have to IPI broadcast the NMI, which is less than ideal.
>
> RCU doesn't have that problem because the quiescent state is a global
> thing. CPU progress, which is what the NMI watchdog tests, is very much
> per logical CPU though.
>
>> > I agree that it would be lovely to free up the one counter though.
>>
>> One option is to use the TCO watchdog in the chipset instead.
>> Unfortunatley it's not an universal solution because some BIOS lock
>> the TCO watchdog for their own use. But if you have a BIOS that
>> doesn't do that it should work.
>
> I suppose you could also route the HPET to the NMI vector and other
> similar things. Still, you're then stuck with IPI broadcasts, which
> suck.
>
Can the HPET interrupt (whatever vector) be broadcast to all CPUs by hw?

>> > One other approach is running the watchdog off of _any_ PMI, then all we
>> > need to ensure is that PMIs happen semi regularly. There are two cases
>> > where this becomes 'interesting':
>>
>> Seems fairly complex.
>
> Yes.. :/