This patch series addresses the following two problems:
1. A customer provided some evidence which indicates that
the idle tick was stopped; albeit, CPU-specific vmstat
counters still remained populated.
Thus one can only assume quiet_vmstat() was not
invoked on return to the idle loop. If I understand
correctly, I suspect this divergence might erroneously
prevent a reclaim attempt by kswapd. If the number of
zone specific free pages are below their per-cpu drift
value then zone_page_state_snapshot() is used to
compute a more accurate view of the aforementioned
statistic. Thus any task blocked on the NUMA node
specific pfmemalloc_wait queue will be unable to make
significant progress via direct reclaim unless it is
killed after being woken up by kswapd
(see throttle_direct_reclaim())
2. With a SCHED_FIFO task that busy loops on a given CPU,
and kworker for that CPU at SCHED_OTHER priority,
queuing work to sync per-vmstats will either cause that
work to never execute, or stalld (i.e. stall daemon)
boosts kworker priority which causes a latency
violation
As seen previously, the trivial test program (i.e. attached at the end of
this cover letter) executed inside a KVM VM, was used to determine the
somewhat impact under vanilla and with the proposed changes. Firstly, the
mlock(2) and munlock(2) system calls was used solely to modify vmstat item
'NR_MLOCK'. In another scenario, the nanosleep(2) system call was used
several times to suspend execution for a period of time to approximately
compute the number of CPU-cycles in the idle code path. The following is an
average count of CPU-cycles across the aforementioned system calls and the
idle loop, respectively. I believe these results are negligible:
Vanilla Modified
Cycles per idle loop 151858 153258 (+1.0%)
Cycles per syscall 8461 8690 (+2.6%)
Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks.
Changes since v9 [1]:
- Add config to enable/disable syncing when returning to userspace
(Frederic Weisbecker)
- Add missing signed-off-by
(Frederic Weisbecker)
- Use proper CPU value when skipping nohz_full CPUs
(Frederic Weisbecker)
- Use this_cpu_ptr when appropriate
(Frederic Weisbecker)
- Improve changelogs
(Frederic Weisbecker)
- For stat_refresh sysfs file: avoid queueing work on CPU if stats are clean
Changes since v8 [2]:
- For nohz_full CPUs, manage per-CPU vmstat flushing from CPU context
(Frederic Weisbecker)
Changes since v7 [3]:
- Added trivial helpers for modification and testing
(Andrew Morton)
- Modified comment since we do now cancel any delayed
work if the tick is stopped in quiet_vmstat()
- Moved check to ensure vmstat differentials do not
remain if the tick is stopped on exiting to user-mode
into a separate patch
(Frederic Weisbecker)
Changes since v6 [4]:
- Clean vmstat_dirty before differential sync loop
- Cancel pending work if tick stopped
- Do not queue work to remote CPU if tick stopped
Changes since v5 [5]:
- Introduced __tick_nohz_user_enter_prepare()
- Switched to EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL()
Changes since v4 [6]:
- Moved vmstat_dirty specific changes into a separate patch
(Marcelo Tosatti)
Changes since v3 [7]:
- Used EXPORT_SYMBOL() on tick_nohz_user_enter_prepare()
- Replaced need_update()
- Introduced CPU-specific variable namely vmstat_dirty
and mark_vmstat_dirty()
[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20221214131839.GE1930067@lothringen/t/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220924152227.819815-1-atomlin@xxxxxxxxxx/
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220817191346.287594886@xxxxxxxxxx/
[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220808194820.676246-1-atomlin@xxxxxxxxxx/
[5]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220801234258.134609-1-atomlin@xxxxxxxxxx/
[6]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220621172207.1501641-1-atomlin@xxxxxxxxxx/
[7]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220422193647.3808657-1-atomlin@xxxxxxxxxx/
Aaron Tomlin (4):
mm/vmstat: Add CPU-specific variable to track a vmstat discrepancy
mm/vmstat: Use vmstat_dirty to track CPU-specific vmstat discrepancies
tick/nohz_full: Ensure quiet_vmstat() is called on exit to user-mode
when the idle tick is stopped
tick/sched: Ensure quiet_vmstat() is called when the idle tick was
stopped too
Marcelo Tosatti (2):
mm/vmstat: Do not queue vmstat_update if tick is stopped
mm/vmstat: avoid queueing work item if cpu stats are clean
include/linux/tick.h | 5 ++-
include/linux/vmstat.h | 4 +-
kernel/time/tick-sched.c | 19 ++++++++++++-
mm/Kconfig | 13 +++++++++
mm/vmstat.c | 156 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------------------------------
5 files changed, 145 insertions(+), 52 deletions(-)
