This feature allows the scheduler to expose a per-memory map concurrency
ID to user-space. This concurrency ID is within the possible cpus range,
and is temporarily (and uniquely) assigned while threads are actively
running within a memory map. If a memory map has fewer threads than
cores, or is limited to run on few cores concurrently through sched
affinity or cgroup cpusets, the concurrency IDs will be values close
to 0, thus allowing efficient use of user-space memory for per-cpu
data structures.
This feature is meant to be exposed by a new rseq thread area field.
The primary purpose of this feature is to do the heavy-lifting needed
by memory allocators to allow them to use per-cpu data structures
efficiently in the following situations:
- Single-threaded applications,
- Multi-threaded applications on large systems (many cores) with limited
cpu affinity mask,
- Multi-threaded applications on large systems (many cores) with
restricted cgroup cpuset per container.
One of the key concern from scheduler maintainers is the overhead
associated with additional spin locks or atomic operations in the
scheduler fast-path. This is why the following optimization is
implemented.
On context switch between threads belonging to the same memory map,
transfer the mm_cid from prev to next without any atomic ops. This
takes care of use-cases involving frequent context switch between
threads belonging to the same memory map.
Additional optimizations can be done if the spin locks added when
context switching between threads belonging to different memory maps end
up being a performance bottleneck. Those are left out of this patch
though. A performance impact would have to be clearly demonstrated to
justify the added complexity.
The credit goes to Paul Turner (Google) for the original virtual cpu id
idea. This feature is implemented based on the discussions with Paul
Turner and Peter Oskolkov (Google), but I took the liberty to implement
scheduler fast-path optimizations and my own NUMA-awareness scheme. The
rumor has it that Google have been running a rseq vcpu_id extension
internally in production for a year. The tcmalloc source code indeed has
comments hinting at a vcpu_id prototype extension to the rseq system
call [1].
The following benchmarks do not show any significant overhead added to
the scheduler context switch by this feature:
* perf bench sched messaging (process)
Baseline: 86.5±0.3 ms
With mm_cid: 86.7±2.6 ms
* perf bench sched messaging (threaded)
Baseline: 84.3±3.0 ms
With mm_cid: 84.7±2.6 ms
* hackbench (process)
Baseline: 82.9±2.7 ms
With mm_cid: 82.9±2.9 ms
* hackbench (threaded)
Baseline: 85.2±2.6 ms
With mm_cid: 84.4±2.9 ms
[1] https://github.com/google/tcmalloc/blob/master/tcmalloc/internal/linux_syscall_support.h#L26
Signed-off-by: Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20221122203932.231377-8-mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com
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