From 8932a63d5edb02f714d50c26583152fe0a97a69c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Paul E. McKenney" Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:20:14 -0700 Subject: rcu: Reduce cache-miss initialization latencies for large systems Commit #0209f649 (rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout) set an upper limit of 16 on the leaf-level fanout for the rcu_node tree. This was needed to reduce lock contention that was induced by the synchronization of scheduling-clock interrupts, which was in turn needed to improve energy efficiency for moderate-sized lightly loaded servers. However, reducing the leaf-level fanout means that there are more leaf-level rcu_node structures in the tree, which in turn means that RCU's grace-period initialization incurs more cache misses. This is not a problem on moderate-sized servers with only a few tens of CPUs, but becomes a major source of real-time latency spikes on systems with many hundreds of CPUs. In addition, the workloads running on these large systems tend to be CPU-bound, which eliminates the energy-efficiency advantages of synchronizing scheduling-clock interrupts. Therefore, these systems need maximal values for the rcu_node leaf-level fanout. This commit addresses this problem by introducing a new kernel parameter named RCU_FANOUT_LEAF that directly controls the leaf-level fanout. This parameter defaults to 16 to handle the common case of a moderate sized lightly loaded servers, but may be set higher on larger systems. Reported-by: Mike Galbraith Reported-by: Dimitri Sivanich Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney --- init/Kconfig | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 27 insertions(+) (limited to 'init') diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig index 85c6870ed476..6d18ef8071b5 100644 --- a/init/Kconfig +++ b/init/Kconfig @@ -458,6 +458,33 @@ config RCU_FANOUT Select a specific number if testing RCU itself. Take the default if unsure. +config RCU_FANOUT_LEAF + int "Tree-based hierarchical RCU leaf-level fanout value" + range 2 RCU_FANOUT if 64BIT + range 2 RCU_FANOUT if !64BIT + depends on TREE_RCU || TREE_PREEMPT_RCU + default 16 + help + This option controls the leaf-level fanout of hierarchical + implementations of RCU, and allows trading off cache misses + against lock contention. Systems that synchronize their + scheduling-clock interrupts for energy-efficiency reasons will + want the default because the smaller leaf-level fanout keeps + lock contention levels acceptably low. Very large systems + (hundreds or thousands of CPUs) will instead want to set this + value to the maximum value possible in order to reduce the + number of cache misses incurred during RCU's grace-period + initialization. These systems tend to run CPU-bound, and thus + are not helped by synchronized interrupts, and thus tend to + skew them, which reduces lock contention enough that large + leaf-level fanouts work well. + + Select a specific number if testing RCU itself. + + Select the maximum permissible value for large systems. + + Take the default if unsure. + config RCU_FANOUT_EXACT bool "Disable tree-based hierarchical RCU auto-balancing" depends on TREE_RCU || TREE_PREEMPT_RCU -- cgit v1.2.3