7a25759eaa
It was noted that a few workloads that idle rapidly regressed when commit
36fcb4292473 ("cpuidle: use first valid target residency as poll time")
was merged. The workloads in question were heavy communicators that idle
rapidly and were impacted by the c-state exit latency as the active CPUs
were not polling at the time of wakeup. As they were not particularly
realistic workloads, it was not considered to be a major problem.
Unfortunately, a bug was reported for a real workload in a production
environment that relied on large numbers of threads operating in a worker
pool pattern. These threads would idle for periods of time longer than the
C1 target residency and so incurred the c-state exit latency penalty. The
application is very sensitive to wakeup latency and indirectly relying
on behaviour prior to commit on a37b969a61c1 ("cpuidle: poll_state: Add
time limit to poll_idle()") to poll for long enough to avoid the exit
latency cost.
The target residency of C1 is typically very short. On some x86 machines,
it can be as low as 2 microseconds. In poll_idle(), the clock is checked
every POLL_IDLE_RELAX_COUNT interations of cpu_relax() and even one
iteration of that loop can be over 1 microsecond so the polling interval is
very close to the granularity of what poll_idle() can detect. Furthermore,
a basic ping pong workload like perf bench pipe has a longer round-trip
time than the 2 microseconds meaning that the CPU will almost certainly
not be polling when the ping-pong completes.
This patch selects a polling interval based on an enabled c-state that
has an target residency longer than 10usec. If there is no enabled-cstate
then polling will be up to a TICK_NSEC/16 similar to what it was up until
kernel 4.20. Polling for a full tick is unlikely (rescheduling event)
and is much longer than the existing target residencies for a deep c-state.
As an example, consider a CPU with the following c-state information from
an Intel CPU;
residency exit_latency
C1 2 2
C1E 20 10
C3 100 33
C6 400 133
The polling interval selected is 20usec. If booted with
intel_idle.max_cstate=1 then the polling interval is 250usec as the deeper
c-states were not available.
On an AMD EPYC machine, the c-state information is more limited and
looks like
residency exit_latency
C1 2 1
C2 800 400
The polling interval selected is 250usec. While C2 was considered, the
polling interval was clamped by CPUIDLE_POLL_MAX.
Note that it is not expected that polling will be a universal win. As
well as potentially trading power for performance, the performance is not
guaranteed if the extra polling prevented a turbo state being reached.
Making it a tunable was considered but it's driver-specific, may be
overridden by a governor and is not a guaranteed polling interval making
it difficult to describe without knowledge of the implementation.
tbench4
vanilla polling
Hmean 1 497.89 ( 0.00%) 543.15 * 9.09%*
Hmean 2 975.88 ( 0.00%) 1059.73 * 8.59%*
Hmean 4 1953.97 ( 0.00%) 2081.37 * 6.52%*
Hmean 8 3645.76 ( 0.00%) 4052.95 * 11.17%*
Hmean 16 6882.21 ( 0.00%) 6995.93 * 1.65%*
Hmean 32 10752.20 ( 0.00%) 10731.53 * -0.19%*
Hmean 64 12875.08 ( 0.00%) 12478.13 * -3.08%*
Hmean 128 21500.54 ( 0.00%) 21098.60 * -1.87%*
Hmean 256 21253.70 ( 0.00%) 21027.18 * -1.07%*
Hmean 320 20813.50 ( 0.00%) 20580.64 * -1.12%*
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.