14 Apr, 2009

1 commit

  • This patch fixes a hierarchical-RCU performance bug located by Anton
    Blanchard. The problem stems from a misguided attempt to provide a
    work-around for jiffies-counter failure. This work-around uses a per-CPU
    n_rcu_pending counter, which is incremented on each call to rcu_pending(),
    which in turn is called from each scheduling-clock interrupt. Each CPU
    then treats this counter as a surrogate for the jiffies counter, so
    that if the jiffies counter fails to advance, the per-CPU n_rcu_pending
    counter will cause RCU to invoke force_quiescent_state(), which in turn
    will (among other things) send resched IPIs to CPUs that have thus far
    failed to pass through an RCU quiescent state.

    Unfortunately, each CPU resets only its own counter after sending a
    batch of IPIs. This means that the other CPUs will also (needlessly)
    send -another- round of IPIs, for a full N-squared set of IPIs in the
    worst case every three scheduler-clock ticks until the grace period
    finally ends. It is not reasonable for a given CPU to reset each and
    every n_rcu_pending for all the other CPUs, so this patch instead simply
    disables the jiffies-counter "training wheels", thus eliminating the
    excessive IPIs.

    Note that the jiffies-counter IPIs do not have this problem due to
    the fact that the jiffies counter is global, so that the CPU sending
    the IPIs can easily reset things, thus preventing the other CPUs from
    sending redundant IPIs.

    Note also that the n_rcu_pending counter remains, as it will continue to
    be used for tracing. It may also see use to update the jiffies counter,
    should an appropriate kick-the-jiffies-counter API appear.

    Located-by: Anton Blanchard
    Tested-by: Anton Blanchard
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Cc: anton@samba.org
    Cc: akpm@linux-foundation.org
    Cc: dipankar@in.ibm.com
    Cc: manfred@colorfullife.com
    Cc: cl@linux-foundation.org
    Cc: josht@linux.vnet.ibm.com
    Cc: schamp@sgi.com
    Cc: niv@us.ibm.com
    Cc: dvhltc@us.ibm.com
    Cc: ego@in.ibm.com
    Cc: laijs@cn.fujitsu.com
    Cc: rostedt@goodmis.org
    Cc: peterz@infradead.org
    Cc: penberg@cs.helsinki.fi
    Cc: andi@firstfloor.org
    Cc: "Paul E. McKenney"
    LKML-Reference:
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Paul E. McKenney
     

03 Apr, 2009

2 commits

  • Impact: cleanup

    We want to remove rcutree internals from the public rcutree.h file for
    upcoming kmemtrace changes - but kernel/rcutree_trace.c depends on them.

    Introduce kernel/rcutree.h for internal definitions. (Probably all
    the other data types from include/linux/rcutree.h could be
    moved here too - except rcu_data.)

    Cc: Pekka Enberg
    Cc: Eduard - Gabriel Munteanu
    Cc: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
    LKML-Reference:
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Ingo Molnar
     
  • Impact: build fix for all non-x86 architectures

    We want to remove percpu.h from rcuclassic.h/rcutree.h (for upcoming
    kmemtrace changes) but that would break the DECLARE_PER_CPU based
    declarations in these files.

    Move the quiescent counter management functions to their respective
    RCU implementation .c files - they were slightly above the inlining
    limit anyway.

    Cc: Pekka Enberg
    Cc: Eduard - Gabriel Munteanu
    Cc: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
    LKML-Reference:
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Ingo Molnar
     

26 Feb, 2009

1 commit

  • This patch fixes a bug located by Vegard Nossum with the aid of
    kmemcheck, updated based on review comments from Nick Piggin,
    Ingo Molnar, and Andrew Morton. And cleans up the variable-name
    and function-name language. ;-)

    The boot CPU runs in the context of its idle thread during boot-up.
    During this time, idle_cpu(0) will always return nonzero, which will
    fool Classic and Hierarchical RCU into deciding that a large chunk of
    the boot-up sequence is a big long quiescent state. This in turn causes
    RCU to prematurely end grace periods during this time.

    This patch changes the rcutree.c and rcuclassic.c rcu_check_callbacks()
    function to ignore the idle task as a quiescent state until the
    system has started up the scheduler in rest_init(), introducing a
    new non-API function rcu_idle_now_means_idle() to inform RCU of this
    transition. RCU maintains an internal rcu_idle_cpu_truthful variable
    to track this state, which is then used by rcu_check_callback() to
    determine if it should believe idle_cpu().

    Because this patch has the effect of disallowing RCU grace periods
    during long stretches of the boot-up sequence, this patch also introduces
    Josh Triplett's UP-only optimization that makes synchronize_rcu() be a
    no-op if num_online_cpus() returns 1. This allows boot-time code that
    calls synchronize_rcu() to proceed normally. Note, however, that RCU
    callbacks registered by call_rcu() will likely queue up until later in
    the boot sequence. Although rcuclassic and rcutree can also use this
    same optimization after boot completes, rcupreempt must restrict its
    use of this optimization to the portion of the boot sequence before the
    scheduler starts up, given that an rcupreempt RCU read-side critical
    section may be preeempted.

    In addition, this patch takes Nick Piggin's suggestion to make the
    system_state global variable be __read_mostly.

    Changes since v4:

    o Changes the name of the introduced function and variable to
    be less emotional. ;-)

    Changes since v3:

    o WARN_ON(nr_context_switches() > 0) to verify that RCU
    switches out of boot-time mode before the first context
    switch, as suggested by Nick Piggin.

    Changes since v2:

    o Created rcu_blocking_is_gp() internal-to-RCU API that
    determines whether a call to synchronize_rcu() is itself
    a grace period.

    o The definition of rcu_blocking_is_gp() for rcuclassic and
    rcutree checks to see if but a single CPU is online.

    o The definition of rcu_blocking_is_gp() for rcupreempt
    checks to see both if but a single CPU is online and if
    the system is still in early boot.

    This allows rcupreempt to again work correctly if running
    on a single CPU after booting is complete.

    o Added check to rcupreempt's synchronize_sched() for there
    being but one online CPU.

    Tested all three variants both SMP and !SMP, booted fine, passed a short
    rcutorture test on both x86 and Power.

    Located-by: Vegard Nossum
    Tested-by: Vegard Nossum
    Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Paul E. McKenney
     

14 Jan, 2009

1 commit


05 Jan, 2009

2 commits

  • Impact: fix kernel warnings [and potential crash] during suspend+resume

    Kudos to both Dhaval Giani and Jens Axboe for finding a bug in treercu
    that causes warnings after suspend-resume cycles in Dhaval's case and
    during stress tests in Jens's case. It would also probably cause failures
    if heavily stressed. The solution, ironically enough, is to revert to
    rcupreempt's code for initializing the dynticks state. And the patch
    even results in smaller code -- so what was I thinking???

    This is 2.6.29 material, given that people really do suspend and resume
    Linux these days. ;-)

    Reported-by: Dhaval Giani
    Reported-by: Jens Axboe
    Tested-by: Dhaval Giani
    Tested-by: Jens Axboe
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Paul E. McKenney
     
  • Impact: fix delays during bootup

    Kudos to Andi Kleen for finding a grace-period-latency problem! The
    problem was that the special-case code for small machines never updated
    the ->signaled field to indicate that grace-period initialization had
    completed, which prevented force_quiescent_state() from ever expediting
    grace periods. This problem resulted in grace periods extending for more
    than 20 seconds. Not subtle. I introduced this bug during my inspection
    process when I fixed a race between grace-period initialization and
    force_quiescent_state() execution.

    The following patch properly updates the ->signaled field for the
    "small"-system case (no more than 32 CPUs for 32-bit kernels and no more
    than 64 CPUs for 64-bit kernels).

    Reported-by: Andi Kleen
    Tested-by: Andi Kleen
    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Paul E. McKenney
     

19 Dec, 2008

1 commit

  • This patch fixes a long-standing performance bug in classic RCU that
    results in massive internal-to-RCU lock contention on systems with
    more than a few hundred CPUs. Although this patch creates a separate
    flavor of RCU for ease of review and patch maintenance, it is intended
    to replace classic RCU.

    This patch still handles stress better than does mainline, so I am still
    calling it ready for inclusion. This patch is against the -tip tree.
    Nevertheless, experience on an actual 1000+ CPU machine would still be
    most welcome.

    Most of the changes noted below were found while creating an rcutiny
    (which should permit ejecting the current rcuclassic) and while doing
    detailed line-by-line documentation.

    Updates from v9 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/2/334):

    o Fixes from remainder of line-by-line code walkthrough,
    including comment spelling, initialization, undesirable
    narrowing due to type conversion, removing redundant memory
    barriers, removing redundant local-variable initialization,
    and removing redundant local variables.

    I do not believe that any of these fixes address the CPU-hotplug
    issues that Andi Kleen was seeing, but please do give it a whirl
    in case the machine is smarter than I am.

    A writeup from the walkthrough may be found at the following
    URL, in case you are suffering from terminal insomnia or
    masochism:

    http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/tmp/rcutree-walkthrough.2008.12.16a.pdf

    o Made rcutree tracing use seq_file, as suggested some time
    ago by Lai Jiangshan.

    o Added a .csv variant of the rcudata debugfs trace file, to allow
    people having thousands of CPUs to drop the data into
    a spreadsheet. Tested with oocalc and gnumeric. Updated
    documentation to suit.

    Updates from v8 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/15/139):

    o Fix a theoretical race between grace-period initialization and
    force_quiescent_state() that could occur if more than three
    jiffies were required to carry out the grace-period
    initialization. Which it might, if you had enough CPUs.

    o Apply Ingo's printk-standardization patch.

    o Substitute local variables for repeated accesses to global
    variables.

    o Fix comment misspellings and redundant (but harmless) increments
    of ->n_rcu_pending (this latter after having explicitly added it).

    o Apply checkpatch fixes.

    Updates from v7 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/10/291):

    o Fixed a number of problems noted by Gautham Shenoy, including
    the cpu-stall-detection bug that he was having difficulty
    convincing me was real. ;-)

    o Changed cpu-stall detection to wait for ten seconds rather than
    three in order to reduce false positive, as suggested by Ingo
    Molnar.

    o Produced a design document (http://lwn.net/Articles/305782/).
    The act of writing this document uncovered a number of both
    theoretical and "here and now" bugs as noted below.

    o Fix dynticks_nesting accounting confusion, simplify WARN_ON()
    condition, fix kerneldoc comments, and add memory barriers
    in dynticks interface functions.

    o Add more data to tracing.

    o Remove unused "rcu_barrier" field from rcu_data structure.

    o Count calls to rcu_pending() from scheduling-clock interrupt
    to use as a surrogate timebase should jiffies stop counting.

    o Fix a theoretical race between force_quiescent_state() and
    grace-period initialization. Yes, initialization does have to
    go on for some jiffies for this race to occur, but given enough
    CPUs...

    Updates from v6 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/23/448):

    o Fix a number of checkpatch.pl complaints.

    o Apply review comments from Ingo Molnar and Lai Jiangshan
    on the stall-detection code.

    o Fix several bugs in !CONFIG_SMP builds.

    o Fix a misspelled config-parameter name so that RCU now announces
    at boot time if stall detection is configured.

    o Run tests on numerous combinations of configurations parameters,
    which after the fixes above, now build and run correctly.

    Updates from v5 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/9/15/92, bad subject line):

    o Fix a compiler error in the !CONFIG_FANOUT_EXACT case (blew a
    changeset some time ago, and finally got around to retesting
    this option).

    o Fix some tracing bugs in rcupreempt that caused incorrect
    totals to be printed.

    o I now test with a more brutal random-selection online/offline
    script (attached). Probably more brutal than it needs to be
    on the people reading it as well, but so it goes.

    o A number of optimizations and usability improvements:

    o Make rcu_pending() ignore the grace-period timeout when
    there is no grace period in progress.

    o Make force_quiescent_state() avoid going for a global
    lock in the case where there is no grace period in
    progress.

    o Rearrange struct fields to improve struct layout.

    o Make call_rcu() initiate a grace period if RCU was
    idle, rather than waiting for the next scheduling
    clock interrupt.

    o Invoke rcu_irq_enter() and rcu_irq_exit() only when
    idle, as suggested by Andi Kleen. I still don't
    completely trust this change, and might back it out.

    o Make CONFIG_RCU_TRACE be the single config variable
    manipulated for all forms of RCU, instead of the prior
    confusion.

    o Document tracing files and formats for both rcupreempt
    and rcutree.

    Updates from v4 for those missing v5 given its bad subject line:

    o Separated dynticks interface so that NMIs and irqs call separate
    functions, greatly simplifying it. In particular, this code
    no longer requires a proof of correctness. ;-)

    o Separated dynticks state out into its own per-CPU structure,
    avoiding the duplicated accounting.

    o The case where a dynticks-idle CPU runs an irq handler that
    invokes call_rcu() is now correctly handled, forcing that CPU
    out of dynticks-idle mode.

    o Review comments have been applied (thank you all!!!).
    For but one example, fixed the dynticks-ordering issue that
    Manfred pointed out, saving me much debugging. ;-)

    o Adjusted rcuclassic and rcupreempt to handle dynticks changes.

    Attached is an updated patch to Classic RCU that applies a hierarchy,
    greatly reducing the contention on the top-level lock for large machines.
    This passes 10-hour concurrent rcutorture and online-offline testing on
    128-CPU ppc64 without dynticks enabled, and exposes some timekeeping
    bugs in presence of dynticks (exciting working on a system where
    "sleep 1" hangs until interrupted...), which were fixed in the
    2.6.27 kernel. It is getting more reliable than mainline by some
    measures, so the next version will be against -tip for inclusion.
    See also Manfred Spraul's recent patches (or his earlier work from
    2004 at http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=108546384711797&w=2).
    We will converge onto a common patch in the fullness of time, but are
    currently exploring different regions of the design space. That said,
    I have already gratefully stolen quite a few of Manfred's ideas.

    This patch provides CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT, which controls the bushiness
    of the RCU hierarchy. Defaults to 32 on 32-bit machines and 64 on
    64-bit machines. If CONFIG_NR_CPUS is less than CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT,
    there is no hierarchy. By default, the RCU initialization code will
    adjust CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT to balance the hierarchy, so strongly NUMA
    architectures may choose to set CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_EXACT to disable
    this balancing, allowing the hierarchy to be exactly aligned to the
    underlying hardware. Up to two levels of hierarchy are permitted
    (in addition to the root node), allowing up to 16,384 CPUs on 32-bit
    systems and up to 262,144 CPUs on 64-bit systems. I just know that I
    am going to regret saying this, but this seems more than sufficient
    for the foreseeable future. (Some architectures might wish to set
    CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT=4, which would limit such architectures to 64 CPUs.
    If this becomes a real problem, additional levels can be added, but I
    doubt that it will make a significant difference on real hardware.)

    In the common case, a given CPU will manipulate its private rcu_data
    structure and the rcu_node structure that it shares with its immediate
    neighbors. This can reduce both lock and memory contention by multiple
    orders of magnitude, which should eliminate the need for the strange
    manipulations that are reported to be required when running Linux on
    very large systems.

    Some shortcomings:

    o More bugs will probably surface as a result of an ongoing
    line-by-line code inspection.

    Patches will be provided as required.

    o There are probably hangs, rcutorture failures, &c. Seems
    quite stable on a 128-CPU machine, but that is kind of small
    compared to 4096 CPUs. However, seems to do better than
    mainline.

    Patches will be provided as required.

    o The memory footprint of this version is several KB larger
    than rcuclassic.

    A separate UP-only rcutiny patch will be provided, which will
    reduce the memory footprint significantly, even compared
    to the old rcuclassic. One such patch passes light testing,
    and has a memory footprint smaller even than rcuclassic.
    Initial reaction from various embedded guys was "it is not
    worth it", so am putting it aside.

    Credits:

    o Manfred Spraul for ideas, review comments, and bugs spotted,
    as well as some good friendly competition. ;-)

    o Josh Triplett, Ingo Molnar, Peter Zijlstra, Mathieu Desnoyers,
    Lai Jiangshan, Andi Kleen, Andy Whitcroft, and Andrew Morton
    for reviews and comments.

    o Thomas Gleixner for much-needed help with some timer issues
    (see patches below).

    o Jon M. Tollefson, Tim Pepper, Andrew Theurer, Jose R. Santos,
    Andy Whitcroft, Darrick Wong, Nishanth Aravamudan, Anton
    Blanchard, Dave Kleikamp, and Nathan Lynch for keeping machines
    alive despite my heavy abuse^Wtesting.

    Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney
    Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar

    Paul E. McKenney