The problem:
On -rt, an emulated LAPIC timer instances has the following path:
1) hard interrupt
2) ksoftirqd is scheduled
3) ksoftirqd wakes up vcpu thread
4) vcpu thread is scheduled
This extra context switch introduces unnecessary latency in the
LAPIC path for a KVM guest.
The solution:
Allow waking up vcpu thread from hardirq context,
thus avoiding the need for ksoftirqd to be scheduled.
Normal waitqueues make use of spinlocks, which on -RT
are sleepable locks. Therefore, waking up a waitqueue
waiter involves locking a sleeping lock, which
is not allowed from hard interrupt context.
cyclictest command line:
This patch reduces the average latency in my tests from 14us to 11us.
Daniel writes:
Paolo asked for numbers from kvm-unit-tests/tscdeadline_latency
benchmark on mainline. The test was run 1000 times on
tip/sched/core 4.4.0-rc8-01134-g0905f04:
./x86-run x86/tscdeadline_latency.flat -cpu host
with idle=poll.
The test seems not to deliver really stable numbers though most of
them are smaller. Paolo write:
"Anything above ~10000 cycles means that the host went to C1 or
lower---the number means more or less nothing in that case.
The mean shows an improvement indeed."
Before:
min max mean std
count 1000.000000 1000.000000 1000.000000 1000.000000
mean 5162.596000 2019270.084000 5824.491541 20681.645558
std 75.431231 622607.723969 89.575700 6492.272062
min 4466.000000 23928.000000 5537.926500 585.864966
25% 5163.000000 1613252.750000 5790.132275 16683.745433
50% 5175.000000 2281919.000000 5834.654000 23151.990026
75% 5190.000000 2382865.750000 5861.412950 24148.206168
max 5228.000000 4175158.000000 6254.827300 46481.048691
After
min max mean std
count 1000.000000 1000.00000 1000.000000 1000.000000
mean 5143.511000 2076886.10300 5813.312474 21207.357565
std 77.668322 610413.09583 86.541500 6331.915127
min 4427.000000 25103.00000 5529.756600 559.187707
25% 5148.000000 1691272.75000 5784.889825 17473.518244
50% 5160.000000 2308328.50000 5832.025000 23464.837068
75% 5172.000000 2393037.75000 5853.177675 24223.969976
max 5222.000000 3922458.00000 6186.720500 42520.379830
[Patch was originaly based on the swait implementation found in the -rt
tree. Daniel ported it to mainline's version and gathered the
benchmark numbers for tscdeadline_latency test.]
Signed-off-by: Daniel Wagner <daniel.wagner@bmw-carit.de>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: linux-rt-users@vger.kernel.org
Cc: Boqun Feng <boqun.feng@gmail.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1455871601-27484-4-git-send-email-wagi@monom.org
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
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