It is sometimes desirable to be able to trigger BPF program from user-space
with minimal overhead. sys_enter would seem to be a good candidate, yet in
a lot of cases there will be a lot of noise from syscalls triggered by other
processes on the system. So while searching for low-overhead alternative, I've
stumbled upon getpgid() syscall, which seems to be specific enough to not
suffer from accidental syscall by other apps.
This set of benchmarks compares tp, raw_tp w/ filtering by syscall ID, kprobe,
fentry and fmod_ret with returning error (so that syscall would not be
executed), to determine the lowest-overhead way. Here are results on my
machine (using benchs/run_bench_trigger.sh script):
base : 9.200 ± 0.319M/s
tp : 6.690 ± 0.125M/s
rawtp : 8.571 ± 0.214M/s
kprobe : 6.431 ± 0.048M/s
fentry : 8.955 ± 0.241M/s
fmodret : 8.903 ± 0.135M/s
So it seems like fmodret doesn't give much benefit for such lightweight
syscall. Raw tracepoint is pretty decent despite additional filtering logic,
but it will be called for any other syscall in the system, which rules it out.
Fentry, though, seems to be adding the least amoung of overhead and achieves
97.3% of performance of baseline no-BPF-attached syscall.
Using getpgid() seems to be preferable to set_task_comm() approach from
test_overhead, as it's about 2.35x faster in a baseline performance.
Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andriin@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Acked-by: John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200512192445.2351848-5-andriin@fb.com
Add fmod_ret BPF program to existing test_overhead selftest. Also re-implement
user-space benchmarking part into benchmark runner to compare results. Results
with ./bench are consistently somewhat lower than test_overhead's, but relative
performance of various types of BPF programs stay consisten (e.g., kretprobe is
noticeably slower). This slowdown seems to be coming from the fact that
test_overhead is single-threaded, while benchmark always spins off at least
one thread for producer. This has been confirmed by hacking multi-threaded
test_overhead variant and also single-threaded bench variant. Resutls are
below. run_bench_rename.sh script from benchs/ subdirectory was used to
produce results for ./bench.
Single-threaded implementations
===============================
/* bench: single-threaded, atomics */
base : 4.622 ± 0.049M/s
kprobe : 3.673 ± 0.052M/s
kretprobe : 2.625 ± 0.052M/s
rawtp : 4.369 ± 0.089M/s
fentry : 4.201 ± 0.558M/s
fexit : 4.309 ± 0.148M/s
fmodret : 4.314 ± 0.203M/s
/* selftest: single-threaded, no atomics */
task_rename base 4555K events per sec
task_rename kprobe 3643K events per sec
task_rename kretprobe 2506K events per sec
task_rename raw_tp 4303K events per sec
task_rename fentry 4307K events per sec
task_rename fexit 4010K events per sec
task_rename fmod_ret 3984K events per sec
Multi-threaded implementations
==============================
/* bench: multi-threaded w/ atomics */
base : 3.910 ± 0.023M/s
kprobe : 3.048 ± 0.037M/s
kretprobe : 2.300 ± 0.015M/s
rawtp : 3.687 ± 0.034M/s
fentry : 3.740 ± 0.087M/s
fexit : 3.510 ± 0.009M/s
fmodret : 3.485 ± 0.050M/s
/* selftest: multi-threaded w/ atomics */
task_rename base 3872K events per sec
task_rename kprobe 3068K events per sec
task_rename kretprobe 2350K events per sec
task_rename raw_tp 3731K events per sec
task_rename fentry 3639K events per sec
task_rename fexit 3558K events per sec
task_rename fmod_ret 3511K events per sec
/* selftest: multi-threaded, no atomics */
task_rename base 3945K events per sec
task_rename kprobe 3298K events per sec
task_rename kretprobe 2451K events per sec
task_rename raw_tp 3718K events per sec
task_rename fentry 3782K events per sec
task_rename fexit 3543K events per sec
task_rename fmod_ret 3526K events per sec
Note that the fact that ./bench benchmark always uses atomic increments for
counting, while test_overhead doesn't, doesn't influence test results all that
much.
Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andriin@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Acked-by: John Fastabend <john.fastabend@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200512192445.2351848-4-andriin@fb.com
While working on BPF ringbuf implementation, testing, and benchmarking, I've
developed a pretty generic and modular benchmark runner, which seems to be
generically useful, as I've already used it for one more purpose (testing
fastest way to trigger BPF program, to minimize overhead of in-kernel code).
This patch adds generic part of benchmark runner and sets up Makefile for
extending it with more sets of benchmarks.
Benchmarker itself operates by spinning up specified number of producer and
consumer threads, setting up interval timer sending SIGALARM signal to
application once a second. Every second, current snapshot with hits/drops
counters are collected and stored in an array. Drops are useful for
producer/consumer benchmarks in which producer might overwhelm consumers.
Once test finishes after given amount of warm-up and testing seconds, mean and
stddev are calculated (ignoring warm-up results) and is printed out to stdout.
This setup seems to give consistent and accurate results.
To validate behavior, I added two atomic counting tests: global and local.
For global one, all the producer threads are atomically incrementing same
counter as fast as possible. This, of course, leads to huge drop of
performance once there is more than one producer thread due to CPUs fighting
for the same memory location.
Local counting, on the other hand, maintains one counter per each producer
thread, incremented independently. Once per second, all counters are read and
added together to form final "counting throughput" measurement. As expected,
such setup demonstrates linear scalability with number of producers (as long
as there are enough physical CPU cores, of course). See example output below.
Also, this setup can nicely demonstrate disastrous effects of false sharing,
if care is not taken to take those per-producer counters apart into
independent cache lines.
Demo output shows global counter first with 1 producer, then with 4. Both
total and per-producer performance significantly drop. The last run is local
counter with 4 producers, demonstrating near-perfect scalability.
$ ./bench -a -w1 -d2 -p1 count-global
Setting up benchmark 'count-global'...
Benchmark 'count-global' started.
Iter 0 ( 24.822us): hits 148.179M/s (148.179M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 1 ( 37.939us): hits 149.308M/s (149.308M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 2 (-10.774us): hits 150.717M/s (150.717M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 3 ( 3.807us): hits 151.435M/s (151.435M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Summary: hits 150.488 ± 1.079M/s (150.488M/prod), drops 0.000 ± 0.000M/s
$ ./bench -a -w1 -d2 -p4 count-global
Setting up benchmark 'count-global'...
Benchmark 'count-global' started.
Iter 0 ( 60.659us): hits 53.910M/s ( 13.477M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 1 (-17.658us): hits 53.722M/s ( 13.431M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 2 ( 5.865us): hits 53.495M/s ( 13.374M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 3 ( 0.104us): hits 53.606M/s ( 13.402M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Summary: hits 53.608 ± 0.113M/s ( 13.402M/prod), drops 0.000 ± 0.000M/s
$ ./bench -a -w1 -d2 -p4 count-local
Setting up benchmark 'count-local'...
Benchmark 'count-local' started.
Iter 0 ( 23.388us): hits 640.450M/s (160.113M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 1 ( 2.291us): hits 605.661M/s (151.415M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 2 ( -6.415us): hits 607.092M/s (151.773M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Iter 3 ( -1.361us): hits 601.796M/s (150.449M/prod), drops 0.000M/s
Summary: hits 604.849 ± 2.739M/s (151.212M/prod), drops 0.000 ± 0.000M/s
Benchmark runner supports setting thread affinity for producer and consumer
threads. You can use -a flag for default CPU selection scheme, where first
consumer gets CPU #0, next one gets CPU #1, and so on. Then producer threads
pick up next CPU and increment one-by-one as well. But user can also specify
a set of CPUs independently for producers and consumers with --prod-affinity
1,2-10,15 and --cons-affinity <set-of-cpus>. The latter allows to force
producers and consumers to share same set of CPUs, if necessary.
Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko <andriin@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Yonghong Song <yhs@fb.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/20200512192445.2351848-3-andriin@fb.com
