Re: [PATCH v4 00/14] Implement call_rcu_lazy() and miscellaneous fixes

[Frederic Weisbecker]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 04:43:43AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2022 at 12:53:24PM +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 01:42:02PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 04:36:40PM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 3:46 PM Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > > > On Mon, Aug 29, 2022 at 12:45:40PM -0400, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> > > > > > On 8/29/2022 9:40 AM, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > > 
> > > [ . .  . ]
> > > 
> > > > > > > 2) NOCB implies performance issues.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Which kinds of? There is slightly worse boot times, but I'm guessing that's do
> > > > > > with the extra scheduling overhead of the extra threads which is usually not a
> > > > > > problem except that RCU is used in the critical path of boot up (on ChromeOS).
> > > > >
> > > > > I never measured it myself but executing callbacks on another CPUs, with
> > > > > context switches and locking can only involve significant performance issues if callbacks
> > > > > are frequent. So it's a tradeoff between power and performance.
> > > > 
> > > > In my testing of benchmarks on real systems with 8-16 CPUs, the
> > > > performance hit is down in the noise. It is possible though that maybe
> > > > one can write a non-realistic synthetic test to force the performance
> > > > issues, but I've not seen it in the real world. Maybe on
> > > > networking-heavy servers with lots of cores, you'll see it but their
> > > > batteries if any would be pretty big :-).
> > > 
> > > To Frederic's point, if you have enough servers, even a 1% decrease in
> > > power consumption is a very big deal.  ;-)
> > 
> > The world has enough servers, for that matters ;-)
> 
> True enough!  Now you need only demonstrate that call_rcu_lazy() for
> !rcu_nocbs servers would actually deliver that 1%.  ;-)

Well, !rcu_nocbs is not only used by server but also by pretty much
everything else, except android IIUC. I can't really measure the whole
world but I don't see how the idleness of a server/router/desktop/embedded/rt/hpc
device differs from the idleness of an android device.

But ok I'll try to measure that.