There's been reports of high NMI handler overhead, highlighted by
such kernel messages:
[ 3697.380195] perf samples too long (10009 > 10000), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 13000
[ 3697.389509] INFO: NMI handler (perf_event_nmi_handler) took too long to run: 9.331 msecs
Don Zickus analyzed the source of the overhead and reported:
> While there are a few places that are causing latencies, for now I focused on
> the longest one first. It seems to be 'copy_user_from_nmi'
>
> intel_pmu_handle_irq ->
> intel_pmu_drain_pebs_nhm ->
> __intel_pmu_drain_pebs_nhm ->
> __intel_pmu_pebs_event ->
> intel_pmu_pebs_fixup_ip ->
> copy_from_user_nmi
>
> In intel_pmu_pebs_fixup_ip(), if the while-loop goes over 50, the sum of
> all the copy_from_user_nmi latencies seems to go over 1,000,000 cycles
> (there are some cases where only 10 iterations are needed to go that high
> too, but in generall over 50 or so). At this point copy_user_from_nmi
> seems to account for over 90% of the nmi latency.
The solution to that is to avoid having to call copy_from_user_nmi() for
every instruction.
Since we already limit the max basic block size, we can easily
pre-allocate a piece of memory to copy the entire thing into in one
go.
Don reported this test result:
> Your patch made a huge difference in improvement. The
> copy_from_user_nmi() no longer hits the million of cycles. I still
> have a batch of 100,000-300,000 cycles. My longest NMI paths used
> to be dominated by copy_from_user_nmi, now it is not (I have to dig
> up the new hot path).
Reported-and-tested-by: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Cc: jmario@redhat.com
Cc: acme@infradead.org
Cc: dave.hansen@linux.intel.com
Cc: eranian@google.com
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20131016105755.GX10651@twins.programming.kicks-ass.net
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
9536c8d2da