Re: [RFC PATCH 1/2] softirq: Account time and iteration stats per vector

[Linus Torvalds]

On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 6:34 AM, Frederic Weisbecker
<frederic@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> That's right. But I thought it was bit large for the stack:
>
>       struct {
>           u64 time;
>           u64 count;
>       } [NR_SOFTIRQS]

Note that you definitely don't want "u64" here.

Both of these values had better be very limited. The "count" is on the
order of 10 - it fits in 4 _bits_ without any overflow.

And 'time' is on the order of 2ms, so even if it's in nanoseconds, we
already know that we want to limit it to a single ms or so (yes, yes,
right now our limit is 2ms, but I think that's long). So even that
doesn't need 64-bit.

Finally, I think you can join them. If we do a "time or count" limit,
let's just make the "count" act as some arbitrary fixed time, so that
we limit things that way.

Say, if we want to limit it to 2ms, consider one count to be 0.2ms. So
instead of keeping track of count at all, just say "make each softirq
call count as at least 200,000ns even if the scheduler clock says it's
less". End result: we'd loop at most ten times.

So now you only need one value, and you know it can't be bigger than 2
million, so it  can be a 32-bit one. Boom. Done.

Also, don't you want these to be percpu, and keep accumulating them
until you decide to either age them away (just clear it in timer
interrupt?) or if the value gets so big that you want o fall back to
the thread instead (and then the thread can clear it every iteration,
so you don't need to track whether the thread is active or not).

I don't know. I'm traveling today, so I didn't actually have time to
really look at the patches, I'm just reacting to Eric's reaction.

          Linus