Re: [PATCH] srcu: Reduce blocking agressiveness of expedited grace periods further

[Neeraj Upadhyay]

On 6/28/2022 2:32 PM, Marc Zyngier wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jun 2022 13:37:06 +0100,
> Neeraj Upadhyay <quic_neeraju@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Commit 640a7d37c3f4 ("srcu: Block less aggressively for expedited
> > grace periods") highlights a problem where aggressively blocking
> > SRCU expedited grace periods, as was introduced in commit
> > 282d8998e997 ("srcu: Prevent expedited GPs and blocking readers
> > from consuming CPU"), introduces ~2 minutes delay to the overall
> > ~3.5 minutes boot time, when starting VMs with "-bios QEMU_EFI.fd"
> > cmdline on qemu, which results in very high rate of memslots
> > add/remove, which causes > ~6000 synchronize_srcu() calls for
> > kvm->srcu SRCU instance.
> >
> > Below table captures the experiments done by Zhangfei Gao, Shameer,
> > to measure the boottime impact with various values of non-sleeping
> > per phase counts, with HZ_250 and preemption enabled:
> >
> > +──────────────────────────+────────────────+
> > | SRCU_MAX_NODELAY_PHASE   | Boot time (s)  |
> > +──────────────────────────+────────────────+
> > | 100                      | 30.053         |
> > | 150                      | 25.151         |
> > | 200                      | 20.704         |
> > | 250                      | 15.748         |
> > | 500                      | 11.401         |
> > | 1000                     | 11.443         |
> > | 10000                    | 11.258         |
> > | 1000000                  | 11.154         |
> > +──────────────────────────+────────────────+
> >
> > Analysis on the experiment results showed improved boot time
> > with non blocking delays close to one jiffy duration. This
> > was also seen when number of per-phase iterations were scaled
> > to one jiffy.
> >
> > So, this change scales per-grace-period phase number of non-sleeping
> > polls, soiuch that, non-sleeping polls are done for one jiffy. In addition
> > to this, srcu_get_delay() call in srcu_gp_end(), which is used to calculate
> > the delay used for scheduling callbacks, is replaced with the check for
> > expedited grace period. This is done, to schedule cbs for completed expedited
> > grace periods immediately, which results in improved boot time seen in
> > experiments.
> >
> > In addition to the changes to default per phase delays, this change
> > adds 3 new kernel parameters - srcutree.srcu_max_nodelay,
> > srcutree.srcu_max_nodelay_phase, srcutree.srcu_retry_check_delay.
> > This allows users to configure the srcu grace period scanning delays,
> > depending on their system configuration requirements.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Neeraj Upadhyay <quic_neeraju@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> I've given this a go on one of my test platforms (the one I noticed
> the issue on the first place), and found that the initial part of the
> EFI boot under KVM (pointlessly wiping the emulated flash) went down
> to 1m7s from 3m50s (HZ=250).
>
> Clearly a massive improvement, but still a far cry from the original
> ~40s (yes, this box is utter crap -- which is why I use it).

Do you see any improvement by using "srcutree.srcu_max_nodelay=1000" 
bootarg, on top of this patch?

> Anyway:
>
> Tested-by: Marc Zyngier <maz@xxxxxxxxxx>

Thanks!


Thanks
Neeraj

> 	M.