From 8932a63d5edb02f714d50c26583152fe0a97a69c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Paul E. McKenney" Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:20:14 -0700 Subject: rcu: Reduce cache-miss initialization latencies for large systems Commit #0209f649 (rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout) set an upper limit of 16 on the leaf-level fanout for the rcu_node tree. This was needed to reduce lock contention that was induced by the synchronization of scheduling-clock interrupts, which was in turn needed to improve energy efficiency for moderate-sized lightly loaded servers. However, reducing the leaf-level fanout means that there are more leaf-level rcu_node structures in the tree, which in turn means that RCU's grace-period initialization incurs more cache misses. This is not a problem on moderate-sized servers with only a few tens of CPUs, but becomes a major source of real-time latency spikes on systems with many hundreds of CPUs. In addition, the workloads running on these large systems tend to be CPU-bound, which eliminates the energy-efficiency advantages of synchronizing scheduling-clock interrupts. Therefore, these systems need maximal values for the rcu_node leaf-level fanout. This commit addresses this problem by introducing a new kernel parameter named RCU_FANOUT_LEAF that directly controls the leaf-level fanout. This parameter defaults to 16 to handle the common case of a moderate sized lightly loaded servers, but may be set higher on larger systems. Reported-by: Mike Galbraith Reported-by: Dimitri Sivanich Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney --- kernel/rcutree.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'kernel/rcutree.c') diff --git a/kernel/rcutree.c b/kernel/rcutree.c index 1050d6d3922c..780acf8e15e9 100644 --- a/kernel/rcutree.c +++ b/kernel/rcutree.c @@ -2418,7 +2418,7 @@ static void __init rcu_init_levelspread(struct rcu_state *rsp) for (i = NUM_RCU_LVLS - 1; i > 0; i--) rsp->levelspread[i] = CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT; - rsp->levelspread[0] = RCU_FANOUT_LEAF; + rsp->levelspread[0] = CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_LEAF; } #else /* #ifdef CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_EXACT */ static void __init rcu_init_levelspread(struct rcu_state *rsp) -- cgit