Re: About threaded interrupt handler CPU affinity

From: John Garry
Date: Mon Aug 12 2019 - 04:47:12 EST

On 10/08/2019 10:47, Ming Lei wrote:
On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 1:40 AM John Garry <john.garry@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 22/07/2019 16:34, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
John,


Hi Thomas,

On Mon, 22 Jul 2019, John Garry wrote:
On 22/07/2019 15:41, Marc Zyngier wrote:
On 22/07/2019 15:14, John Garry wrote:
I have a question on commit cbf8699996a6 ("genirq: Let irq thread follow
the effective hard irq affinity"), if you could kindly check:

Here we set the thread affinity to be the same as the hard interrupt
affinity. For an arm64 system with GIC ITS, this will be a single CPU,
the lowest in the interrupt affinity mask. So, in this case, effectively
the thread will be bound to a single CPU. I think APIC is the same for
this.

The commit message describes the problem that we solve here is that the
thread may become affine to a different CPU to the hard interrupt - does
it mean that the thread CPU mask could not cover that of the hard
interrupt? I couldn't follow the reason.

Assume a 4 CPU system. If the interrupt affinity is on CPU0-1, you could
end up with the effective interrupt affinity on CPU0 (which would be
typical of the ITS), and the thread running on CPU1. Not great.

Sure, not great. But the thread can possibly still run on CPU0.

Sure. It could, but it's up to the scheduler to decide. In general it's the
right thing to run the threaded handler on the CPU which handles the
interrupt.

I'd agree.

With single CPU affinity thats surely a limitation.

We have experimented with fixing the thread mask to be the same as the
interrupt mask (we're using managed interrupts), like before, and get a
significant performance boost at high IO datarates on our storage
controller - like ~11%.

My understanding is that this patch does exactly that. Does it result in
a regression?

Not in the strictest sense for us, I don't know about others. Currently we use
tasklets, and we find that the CPUs servicing the interrupts (and hence
tasklets) are heavily loaded. We experience the same for when experimenting
with threaded interrupt handlers - which would be as expected.

But, when we make the change as mentioned, our IOPS goes from ~3M -> 3.4M.

So your interrupt is affined to more than one CPU, but due to the ITS
limitation the effective affinity is a single CPU, which in turn restricts
the thread handler affinity to the same single CPU.

Even though this is an ITS limitation, the same thing is effectively
done for x86 APIC as policy, right? I'm referring to commit fdba46ffb4c2
("x86/apic: Get rid of multi CPU affinity")

If you lift that
restriction and let it be affine to the full affinity set of the interrupt
then you get better performance, right?

Right

Probably because the other CPU(s)
in the affinity set are less loaded than the one which handles the hard
interrupt.

I will look to get some figures for CPU loading to back this up.


This is heavily use case dependent I assume, so making this a general
change is perhaps not a good idea, but we could surely make this optional.

That sounds reasonable. So would the idea be to enable this optionally
at the request threaded irq call?

I'd suggest to do it for managed IRQ at default, because managed IRQ affinity
is NUMA locality and setup gracefully. And the idea behind is good since the IRQ
handler should have been run in the specified CPUs, especially the thread part
often takes more CPU.

So I was going to send a patch for this change.

However, for the SCSI driver I found it helps performance, managed interrupts are disabled by default (due to this yet unresolved issue https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/29/391 - that's just one thread on this issue), so I don't think that it's right to enable it on that basis.

If there's some other driver which uses manages interrupts + threaded interrupt handlers and we can prove it helps, then I'd say that should be good enough.

Thanks,
John