Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] softirq: Per vector threading v3

[Paolo Abeni]

On Tue, 2018-01-23 at 11:22 -0500, David Miller wrote:
> From: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2018 11:13:52 +0100
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On Fri, 2018-01-19 at 16:46 +0100, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> >> As per Linus suggestion, this take doesn't limit the number of occurences
> >> per jiffy anymore but instead defers a vector to workqueues as soon as
> >> it gets re-enqueued on IRQ tail.
> >> 
> >> No tunable here, so testing should be easier.
> >> 
> >> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/frederic/linux-dynticks.git
> >>      softirq/thread-v3
> >> 
> >> HEAD: 6835e92cbd70ef4a056987d2e1ed383b294429d4
> > 
> > I tested this series in the UDP flood scenario, binding the user space
> > process receiving the packets on the same CPU processing the related
> > IRQ, and the tput sinks nearly to 0, like before Eric's patch.
> > 
> > The perf tool says that almost all the softirq processing is done
> > inside the workqueue, but the user space process is scheduled very
> > rarely, while before this series, in this scenario, ksoftirqd and the
> > user space process got a fair share of the CPU time.
> 
> Do workqueue threads get a higher scheduling priority than user
> processes?

As far as I can see, no: the workqueue thread has the same priority and
nice level than the user space process.

> Or is it that the workqueue execution is simply not yielding for some
> reason?

It's like that.

I spent little time on it, so I haven't many data point. I'll try to
investigate the scenario later this week.

Cheers,

Paolo