On Fri, Jun 07, 2019 at 12:32:23PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > > > On Jun 6, 2019, at 10:32 AM, Sean Christopherson <sean.j.christopherson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >> On Thu, Jun 06, 2019 at 10:20:38AM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote: > >> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 12:49 PM Sean Christopherson > >> <sean.j.christopherson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >>> > >>> For some enclaves, e.g. an enclave with a small code footprint and a > >>> large working set, the vast majority of pages added to the enclave are > >>> zero pages. Introduce a flag to denote such zero pages. The major > >>> benefit of the flag will be realized in a future patch to use Linux's > >>> actual zero page as the source, as opposed to explicitly zeroing the > >>> enclave's backing memory. > >>> > >> > >> I feel like I probably asked this at some point, but why is there a > >> workqueue here at all? > > > > Performance. A while back I wrote a patch set to remove the worker queue > > and discovered that it tanks enclave build time when the enclave is being > > hosted by a Golang application. Here's a snippet from a mail discussing > > the code. > > > > The bad news is that I don't think we can remove the add page worker > > as applications with userspace schedulers, e.g. Go's M:N scheduler, > > can see a 10x or more throughput improvement when using the worker > > queue. I did a bit of digging for the Golang case to make sure I > > wasn't doing something horribly stupid/naive and found that it's a > > generic issue in Golang with blocking (or just long-running) system > > calls. Because Golang multiplexes Goroutines on top of OS threads, > > blocking syscalls introduce latency and context switching overhead, > > e.g. Go's scheduler will spin up a new OS thread to service other > > Goroutines after it realizes the syscall has blocked, and will later > > destroy one of the OS threads so that it doesn't build up too many > > unused. > > > > IIRC, the scenario is spinning up several goroutines, each building an > > enclave. I played around with adding a flag to do a synchronous EADD > > but didn't see a meaningful change in performance for the simple case. > > Supporting both the worker queue and direct paths was complex enough > > that I decided it wasn't worth the trouble for initial upstreaming. > > Sigh. > > It seems silly to add a workaround for a language that has trouble calling > somewhat-but-not-too-slow syscalls or ioctls. > > How about fixing this in Go directly? Either convince the golang people to > add a way to allocate a real thread for a particular region of code or have > the Go SGX folks write a bit of C code to do a whole bunch of ioctls and > have Go call *that*. Then the mess stays in Go where it belongs. Actually, I'm pretty sure changing the ioctl() from ADD_PAGE to ADD_REGION would eliminate the worst of the golang slowdown without requiring userspace to get super fancy. I'm in favor of eliminating the work queue, especially if the UAPI is changed to allow adding multiple pages in a single syscall.
