Hi,
I continue this thread because it's still not understood why enabling
CONFIG_RCU_TRACE is necessary to get reasonable latencies on the
MPC5200. It might also explain, why I get much worse latencies with
2.6.25.8-rt7.
Luotao Fu wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 02:57:16AM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
......
Yes, I used "$ cyclictest -n -t1 -p80 -i1000" to measure the latency. So
far, I have not done other tests. Any recommendation?
As no-rt load I used "while ls; do ls /bin; done" in one telnet window
and "while ./hackbench 10; do ./calibrator 400 32M cali; sleep 30; done"
in another. But already "while ls; do ls /bin; done" is enough to
trigger the high latencies quickly. Note also, that I work on a root
files-ystem mounted via NFS resulting in a lot of network traffic and
utilization.
I have to ask...
Did you see large latencies when -not- running on NFS?
I cannot speak for Wolfgang but I myself did not get extraordinary high
latencies running tests on system booted from flash. Neither I could produce
high latencies on nfs booted system. If my non-rt workload doesn't do heavy
filesystem/network accesses. i.E. running only hackbench. Hence we were
wondering if the problem is caused by rcu's in network layer or nfs
implementation.
To recapitulate, with CONFIG_RCU_TRACE enabled, cyclictest reports max.
latencies of approx. 130 us with 2.6.24.4-rt4 on my MPC5200 PowerPC
board. If I disable it, the latency goes up to 600 us. Obviously, the
trace_mark() calls in rcupreempt*.c have some positive impact on the
latency. I narrowed down, that the 2 calls in __rcu_preempt_boost() in
rcupreempt-boost.c are the important one:
void __rcu_preempt_unboost(void)
{
struct task_struct *curr = current;
struct rcu_boost_dat *rbd;
int prio;
unsigned long flags;
trace_mark(unboost_called, "NULL");
/* if not boosted, then ignore */
if (likely(!rcu_is_boosted(curr)))
return;
/*
* Need to be very careful with NMIs.
* If we take the lock and an NMI comes in
* and it may try to unboost us if curr->rcub_rbdp
* is still set. So we zero it before grabbing the lock.
* But this also means that we might be boosted again
* so the boosting code needs to be aware of this.
*/
rbd = curr->rcub_rbdp;
curr->rcub_rbdp = NULL;
/*
* Now an NMI might have came in after we grab
* the below lock. This check makes sure that
* the NMI doesn't try grabbing the lock
* while we already have it.
*/
if (unlikely(!rbd))
return;
spin_lock_irqsave(&rbd->rbs_lock, flags);
/*
* It is still possible that an NMI came in
* between the "is_boosted" check and setting
* the rcu_rbdp to NULL. This would mean that
* the NMI already dequeued us.
*/
if (unlikely(!rcu_is_boosted(curr)))
goto out;
list_del_init(&curr->rcub_entry);
trace_mark(unboosted, "NULL");
curr->rcu_prio = MAX_PRIO;
spin_lock(&curr->pi_lock);
prio = rt_mutex_getprio(curr);
task_setprio(curr, prio);
curr->rcub_rbdp = NULL;
spin_unlock(&curr->pi_lock);
out:
spin_unlock_irqrestore(&rbd->rbs_lock, flags);
}
With them and all other trace_mark() calls commented out, the latency is
still OK. The first one has a bigger impact.
In 2.6.25.8-rt7, trace_mark() is not used any more but a function
incrementing the corresponding counter directly and I suspect that's the
reason why I'm seeing high latencies with both, CONFIG_RCU_TRACE enabled
and disabled.
I hope this observation sheds some light on the issue.
Wolfgang.
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