On Fri, 13 May 2022 15:23:30 +0100 Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Correct. > > > > the draining in non-deterministic. > > > > s/n/s/;) > > > > Think that one is ok. At least spell check did not complain. s/in/si/ > > > Currently an IRQ-safe local_lock protects the page allocator per-cpu lists. > > > The local_lock on its own prevents migration and the IRQ disabling protects > > > from corruption due to an interrupt arriving while a page allocation is > > > in progress. The locking is inherently unsafe for remote access unless > > > the CPU is hot-removed. > > > > I don't understand the final sentence here. Which CPU and why does > > hot-removing it make the locking safe? > > > > The sentence can be dropped because it adds little and is potentially > confusing. The PCP being safe to access remotely is specific to the > context of the CPU being hot-removed and there are other special corner > cases like zone_pcp_disable that modifies a per-cpu structure remotely > but not in a way that causes corruption. OK. I pasted in your para from the other email. Current 0/n blurb: Some setups, notably NOHZ_FULL CPUs, may be running realtime or latency-sensitive applications that cannot tolerate interference due to per-cpu drain work queued by __drain_all_pages(). Introduce a new mechanism to remotely drain the per-cpu lists. It is made possible by remotely locking 'struct per_cpu_pages' new per-cpu spinlocks. This has two advantages, the time to drain is more predictable and other unrelated tasks are not interrupted. This series has the same intent as Nicolas' series "mm/page_alloc: Remote per-cpu lists drain support" -- avoid interference of a high priority task due to a workqueue item draining per-cpu page lists. While many workloads can tolerate a brief interruption, it may cause a real-time task running on a NOHZ_FULL CPU to miss a deadline and at minimum, the draining is non-deterministic. Currently an IRQ-safe local_lock protects the page allocator per-cpu lists. The local_lock on its own prevents migration and the IRQ disabling protects from corruption due to an interrupt arriving while a page allocation is in progress. This series adjusts the locking. A spinlock is added to struct per_cpu_pages to protect the list contents while local_lock_irq continues to prevent migration and IRQ reentry. This allows a remote CPU to safely drain a remote per-cpu list. This series is a partial series. Follow-on work should allow the local_irq_save to be converted to a local_irq to avoid IRQs being disabled/enabled in most cases. Consequently, there are some TODO comments highlighting the places that would change if local_irq was used. However, there are enough corner cases that it deserves a series on its own separated by one kernel release and the priority right now is to avoid interference of high priority tasks. Patch 1 is a cosmetic patch to clarify when page->lru is storing buddy pages and when it is storing per-cpu pages. Patch 2 shrinks per_cpu_pages to make room for a spin lock. Strictly speaking this is not necessary but it avoids per_cpu_pages consuming another cache line. Patch 3 is a preparation patch to avoid code duplication. Patch 4 is a simple micro-optimisation that improves code flow necessary for a later patch to avoid code duplication. Patch 5 uses a spin_lock to protect the per_cpu_pages contents while still relying on local_lock to prevent migration, stabilise the pcp lookup and prevent IRQ reentrancy. Patch 6 remote drains per-cpu pages directly instead of using a workqueue.
