Re: [External] Re: [RFC] io_uring: avoid ring quiesce while registering/unregistering eventfd

From: Pavel Begunkov
Date: Thu Feb 03 2022 - 10:59:39 EST


On 2/3/22 15:44, Pavel Begunkov wrote:
On 2/3/22 15:14, Usama Arif wrote:
On 02/02/2022 19:18, Jens Axboe wrote:
On 2/2/22 9:57 AM, Jens Axboe wrote:
On 2/2/22 8:59 AM, Usama Arif wrote:
Acquire completion_lock at the start of __io_uring_register before
registering/unregistering eventfd and release it at the end. Hence
all calls to io_cqring_ev_posted which adds to the eventfd counter
will finish before acquiring the spin_lock in io_uring_register, and
all new calls will wait till the eventfd is registered. This avoids
ring quiesce which is much more expensive than acquiring the
spin_lock.

On the system tested with this patch, io_uring_reigster with
IORING_REGISTER_EVENTFD takes less than 1ms, compared to 15ms before.

This seems like optimizing for the wrong thing, so I've got a few
questions. Are you doing a lot of eventfd registrations (and
unregister) in your workload? Or is it just the initial pain of
registering one? In talking to Pavel, he suggested that RCU might be a
good use case here, and I think so too. That would still remove the
need to quiesce, and the posted side just needs a fairly cheap rcu
read lock/unlock around it.

Totally untested, but perhaps can serve as a starting point or
inspiration.


Hi,

Thank you for the replies and comments. My usecase registers only one eventfd at the start.

Then it's overkill. Update io_register_op_must_quiesce(), set ->cq_ev_fd
on registration with WRITE_ONCE(), read it in io_cqring_ev_posted* with
READ_ONCE() and you're set.

Actually needs smp_store_release/smp_load_acquire


There is a caveat, ->cq_ev_fd won't be immediately visible to already
inflight requests, but we can say it's the responsibility of the
userspace to wait for a grace period, i.e. for all inflight requests
submitted before registration io_cqring_ev_posted* might or might not
see updated ->cq_ev_fd, which works perfectly if there was no requests
in the first place. Of course it changes the behaviour so will need
a new register opcode.


--
Pavel Begunkov