This is a kernel enhancement that configures the cpu affinity of kernel
threads via kernel boot option nohz_full=.
When this option is specified, the cpumask is immediately applied upon
kthread launch. This does not affect kernel threads that specify cpu
and node.
This allows CPU isolation (that is not allowing certain threads
to execute on certain CPUs) without using the isolcpus=domain parameter,
making it possible to enable load balancing on such CPUs
during runtime (see kernel-parameters.txt).
Note-1: this is based off on Wind River's patch at
https://github.com/starlingx-staging/stx-integ/blob/master/kernel/kernel-std/centos/patches/affine-compute-kernel-threads.patch
Difference being that this patch is limited to modifying kernel thread
cpumask. Behaviour of other threads can be controlled via cgroups or
sched_setaffinity.
Note-2: Wind River's patch was based off Christoph Lameter's patch at
https://lwn.net/Articles/565932/ with the only difference being
the kernel parameter changed from kthread to kthread_cpus.
Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200527142909.23372-3-frederic@kernel.org
The affinity of managed interrupts is completely handled in the kernel and
cannot be changed via the /proc/irq/* interfaces from user space. As the
kernel tries to spread out interrupts evenly accross CPUs on x86 to prevent
vector exhaustion, it can happen that a managed interrupt whose affinity
mask contains both isolated and housekeeping CPUs is routed to an isolated
CPU. As a consequence IO submitted on a housekeeping CPU causes interrupts
on the isolated CPU.
Add a new sub-parameter 'managed_irq' for 'isolcpus' and the corresponding
logic in the interrupt affinity selection code.
The subparameter indicates to the interrupt affinity selection logic that
it should try to avoid the above scenario.
This isolation is best effort and only effective if the automatically
assigned interrupt mask of a device queue contains isolated and
housekeeping CPUs. If housekeeping CPUs are online then such interrupts are
directed to the housekeeping CPU so that IO submitted on the housekeeping
CPU cannot disturb the isolated CPU.
If a queue's affinity mask contains only isolated CPUs then this parameter
has no effect on the interrupt routing decision, though interrupts are only
happening when tasks running on those isolated CPUs submit IO. IO submitted
on housekeeping CPUs has no influence on those queues.
If the affinity mask contains both housekeeping and isolated CPUs, but none
of the contained housekeeping CPUs is online, then the interrupt is also
routed to an isolated CPU. Interrupts are only delivered when one of the
isolated CPUs in the affinity mask submits IO. If one of the contained
housekeeping CPUs comes online, the CPU hotplug logic migrates the
interrupt automatically back to the upcoming housekeeping CPU. Depending on
the type of interrupt controller, this can require that at least one
interrupt is delivered to the isolated CPU in order to complete the
migration.
[ tglx: Removed unused parameter, added and edited comments/documentation
and rephrased the changelog so it contains more details. ]
Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200120091625.17912-1-ming.lei@redhat.com
Dedicated instances are currently disturbed by unnecessary jitter due
to the emulated lapic timers firing on the same pCPUs where the
vCPUs reside. There is no hardware virtual timer on Intel for guest
like ARM, so both programming timer in guest and the emulated timer fires
incur vmexits. This patch tries to avoid vmexit when the emulated timer
fires, at least in dedicated instance scenario when nohz_full is enabled.
In that case, the emulated timers can be offload to the nearest busy
housekeeping cpus since APICv has been found for several years in server
processors. The guest timer interrupt can then be injected via posted interrupts,
which are delivered by the housekeeping cpu once the emulated timer fires.
The host should tuned so that vCPUs are placed on isolated physical
processors, and with several pCPUs surplus for busy housekeeping.
If disabled mwait/hlt/pause vmexits keep the vCPUs in non-root mode,
~3% redis performance benefit can be observed on Skylake server, and the
number of external interrupt vmexits drops substantially. Without patch
VM-EXIT Samples Samples% Time% Min Time Max Time Avg time
EXTERNAL_INTERRUPT 42916 49.43% 39.30% 0.47us 106.09us 0.71us ( +- 1.09% )
While with patch:
VM-EXIT Samples Samples% Time% Min Time Max Time Avg time
EXTERNAL_INTERRUPT 6871 9.29% 2.96% 0.44us 57.88us 0.72us ( +- 4.02% )
Cc: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
Cc: Radim Krčmář <rkrcmar@redhat.com>
Cc: Marcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Wanpeng Li <wanpengli@tencent.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>
