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authorPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>2012-04-19 12:20:14 -0700
committerPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>2012-04-24 20:54:52 -0700
commit8932a63d5edb02f714d50c26583152fe0a97a69c (patch)
treeec71159908f1a78eb21e736d284ffe7ed7584b6c /init
parentd8169d4c369e8aa2fda10df705a4957331b5a4db (diff)
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rcu: Reduce cache-miss initialization latencies for large systems
Commit #0209f649 (rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout) set an upper limit of 16 on the leaf-level fanout for the rcu_node tree. This was needed to reduce lock contention that was induced by the synchronization of scheduling-clock interrupts, which was in turn needed to improve energy efficiency for moderate-sized lightly loaded servers. However, reducing the leaf-level fanout means that there are more leaf-level rcu_node structures in the tree, which in turn means that RCU's grace-period initialization incurs more cache misses. This is not a problem on moderate-sized servers with only a few tens of CPUs, but becomes a major source of real-time latency spikes on systems with many hundreds of CPUs. In addition, the workloads running on these large systems tend to be CPU-bound, which eliminates the energy-efficiency advantages of synchronizing scheduling-clock interrupts. Therefore, these systems need maximal values for the rcu_node leaf-level fanout. This commit addresses this problem by introducing a new kernel parameter named RCU_FANOUT_LEAF that directly controls the leaf-level fanout. This parameter defaults to 16 to handle the common case of a moderate sized lightly loaded servers, but may be set higher on larger systems. Reported-by: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de> Reported-by: Dimitri Sivanich <sivanich@sgi.com> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'init')
-rw-r--r--init/Kconfig27
1 files changed, 27 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig
index 85c6870..6d18ef8 100644
--- a/init/Kconfig
+++ b/init/Kconfig
@@ -458,6 +458,33 @@ config RCU_FANOUT
Select a specific number if testing RCU itself.
Take the default if unsure.
+config RCU_FANOUT_LEAF
+ int "Tree-based hierarchical RCU leaf-level fanout value"
+ range 2 RCU_FANOUT if 64BIT
+ range 2 RCU_FANOUT if !64BIT
+ depends on TREE_RCU || TREE_PREEMPT_RCU
+ default 16
+ help
+ This option controls the leaf-level fanout of hierarchical
+ implementations of RCU, and allows trading off cache misses
+ against lock contention. Systems that synchronize their
+ scheduling-clock interrupts for energy-efficiency reasons will
+ want the default because the smaller leaf-level fanout keeps
+ lock contention levels acceptably low. Very large systems
+ (hundreds or thousands of CPUs) will instead want to set this
+ value to the maximum value possible in order to reduce the
+ number of cache misses incurred during RCU's grace-period
+ initialization. These systems tend to run CPU-bound, and thus
+ are not helped by synchronized interrupts, and thus tend to
+ skew them, which reduces lock contention enough that large
+ leaf-level fanouts work well.
+
+ Select a specific number if testing RCU itself.
+
+ Select the maximum permissible value for large systems.
+
+ Take the default if unsure.
+
config RCU_FANOUT_EXACT
bool "Disable tree-based hierarchical RCU auto-balancing"
depends on TREE_RCU || TREE_PREEMPT_RCU
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