On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 10:31:51AM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > other arch folk: there's some background here: > > https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CALCETrVXUbe8LfNn-Qs+DzrOQaiw+sFUg1J047yByV31SaTOZw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > > On Sun, Nov 29, 2020 at 12:16 PM Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 7:54 PM Andy Lutomirski <luto@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > On Sat, Nov 28, 2020 at 8:02 AM Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > > > On big systems, the mm refcount can become highly contented when doing > > > > a lot of context switching with threaded applications (particularly > > > > switching between the idle thread and an application thread). > > > > > > > > Abandoning lazy tlb slows switching down quite a bit in the important > > > > user->idle->user cases, so so instead implement a non-refcounted scheme > > > > that causes __mmdrop() to IPI all CPUs in the mm_cpumask and shoot down > > > > any remaining lazy ones. > > > > > > > > Shootdown IPIs are some concern, but they have not been observed to be > > > > a big problem with this scheme (the powerpc implementation generated > > > > 314 additional interrupts on a 144 CPU system during a kernel compile). > > > > There are a number of strategies that could be employed to reduce IPIs > > > > if they turn out to be a problem for some workload. > > > > > > I'm still wondering whether we can do even better. > > > > > > > Hold on a sec.. __mmput() unmaps VMAs, frees pagetables, and flushes > > the TLB. On x86, this will shoot down all lazies as long as even a > > single pagetable was freed. (Or at least it will if we don't have a > > serious bug, but the code seems okay. We'll hit pmd_free_tlb, which > > sets tlb->freed_tables, which will trigger the IPI.) So, on > > architectures like x86, the shootdown approach should be free. The > > only way it ought to have any excess IPIs is if we have CPUs in > > mm_cpumask() that don't need IPI to free pagetables, which could > > happen on paravirt. > > Indeed, on x86, we do this: > > [ 11.558844] flush_tlb_mm_range.cold+0x18/0x1d > [ 11.559905] tlb_finish_mmu+0x10e/0x1a0 > [ 11.561068] exit_mmap+0xc8/0x1a0 > [ 11.561932] mmput+0x29/0xd0 > [ 11.562688] do_exit+0x316/0xa90 > [ 11.563588] do_group_exit+0x34/0xb0 > [ 11.564476] __x64_sys_exit_group+0xf/0x10 > [ 11.565512] do_syscall_64+0x34/0x50 > > and we have info->freed_tables set. > > What are the architectures that have large systems like? > > x86: we already zap lazies, so it should cost basically nothing to do > a little loop at the end of __mmput() to make sure that no lazies are > left. If we care about paravirt performance, we could implement one > of the optimizations I mentioned above to fix up the refcounts instead > of sending an IPI to any remaining lazies. > > arm64: AFAICT arm64's flush uses magic arm64 hardware support for > remote flushes, so any lazy mm references will still exist after > exit_mmap(). (arm64 uses lazy TLB, right?) So this is kind of like > the x86 paravirt case. Are there large enough arm64 systems that any > of this matters? > > s390x: The code has too many acronyms for me to understand it fully, > but I think it's more or less the same situation as arm64. How big do > s390x systems come? > > power: Ridiculously complicated, seems to vary by system and kernel config. > > So, Nick, your unconditional IPI scheme is apparently a big > improvement for power, and it should be an improvement and have low > cost for x86. On arm64 and s390x it will add more IPIs on process > exit but reduce contention on context switching depending on how lazy s390 does not invalidate TLBs per-CPU explicitly - we have special instructions for that. Those in turn initiate signalling to other CPUs, completely transparent to OS. Apart from mm_count, I am struggling to realize how the suggested scheme could change the the contention on s390 in connection with TLB. Could you clarify a bit here, please? > TLB works. I suppose we could try it for all architectures without > any further optimizations. Or we could try one of the perhaps > excessively clever improvements I linked above. arm64, s390x people, > what do you think? I do not immediately see anything in the series that would harm performance on s390. We however use mm_cpumask to distinguish between local and global TLB flushes. With this series it looks like mm_cpumask is *required* to be consistent with lazy users. And that is something quite diffucult for us to adhere (at least in the foreseeable future). But actually keeping track of lazy users in a cpumask is something the generic code would rather do AFAICT. Thanks!
