Re: [PATCH] ipmi_si_intf: use usleep_range() instead of busy looping

[Corey Minyard]

On Mon, Aug 05, 2019 at 11:18:50AM -0700, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Corey.
> 
> On Thu, Aug 01, 2019 at 12:40:02PM -0500, Corey Minyard wrote:
> > I spent some time looking at this.  Without the patch, I
> > measured around 3.5ms to send/receive a get device ID message
> > and uses 100% of the CPU on a core.
> > 
> > I measured your patch, it slowed it down to around 10.5ms
> > per message, which is not good.  Though it did just use a
> > few percent of the core.
> > 
> > I wrote some code to auto-adjust the timer.  It settled on
> > a delay around 35us, which gave 4.7ms per message, which is
> > probably acceptable, and used around 40% of the CPU.  If
> > I use any timeout (even a 0-10us range) it won't go below
> > 4ms per message.
> 
> Out of curiosity, what makes 4.7ms okay and 10.5ms not?  At least for
> the use case we have in the fleet (sensor reading mostly), the less
> disruptive the better as long as things don't timeout and fail.

Well, when you are loading firmware and it takes 10 minutes at
max speed, taking 20-30 minutes is a lot worse.  It's not reading
sensors, which would be fine, it's tranferring large chunks of
data.

> 
> > The process is running at nice 19 priority, so it won't
> > have a significant effect on other processes from a priority
> > point of view.  It may still be hitting the scheduler locks
> > pretty hard, though.  But I played with things quite a bit
> 
> And power.  Imagine multi six digit number of machines burning a full
> core just because of this busy loop to read temperature sensors some
> msecs faster.
> 
> > and the behavior or the management controller is too
> > erratic to set a really good timeout.  Maybe other ones
> > are better, don't know.
> > 
> > One other option we have is that the driver has something
> > called "maintenance mode".  If it detect that you have
> > reset the management controller or are issuing firmware
> > commands, it will modify timeout behavior.  It can also
> > be activated manually.  I could also make it switch to
> > just calling schedule instead of delaying when in that
> > mode.
> 
> Yeah, whatever which makes the common-case behavior avoid busy looping
> would work.

Ok, it's queued in linux-next now (and has been for a few days).
I'll get it into the next kernel release (and I just noticed
a spelling error and fixed it).

-corey

> 
> > The right thing it do is complain bitterly to vendors who
> > build hardware that has to be polled.  But besides that,
> 
> For sure, but there already are a lot of machines with this thing and
> it'll take multiple years for them to retire so...
> 
> > I'm thinking the maintenance mode is the thing to do.
> > It will also change behavior if you reset the management
> > controller, but only for 30 seconds or so.  Does that
> > work?
> 
> Yeah, sounds good to me.
> 
> Thnaks.
> 
> -- 
> tejun