Re: Memory coherency issue with IO thread offloading?

quoted

Can the  queueing cause the creation of an IO thread (if one does not
exist, or all blocked?)

Yep

Since writing this email, I've gone through a lot of different tests.
Here's a rough listing of what I found:

- Like using the hack patch, if I just limit the number of IO thread
  workers to 1, it seems to pass. At least longer than before, does 1000
  iterations.

- If I pin each IO worker to a single CPU, it also passes.

- If I liberally sprinkle smp_mb() for the io-wq side, test still fails.
  I've added one before queueing the work item, and after. One before
  the io-wq worker grabs a work item and one after. Eg full hammer
  approach. This still fails.

Puzzling... For the "pin each IO worker to a single CPU" I added some
basic code around trying to ensure that a work item queued on CPU X
would be processed by a worker on CPU X, and too a large degree, this
does happen. But since the work list is a normal list, it's quite
possible that some other worker finishes its work on CPU Y just in time
to grab the one from cpu X. I checked and this does happen in the test
case, yet it still passes. This may be because I got a bit lucky, but
seems suspect with thousands of passes of the test case.

Another theory there is that it's perhaps related to an io-wq worker
being rescheduled on a different CPU. Though again puzzled as to why the
smp_mb sprinkling didn't fix that then. I'm going to try and run the
test case with JUST the io-wq worker pinning and not caring about where
the work is processed to see if that does anything.

Just pinning each worker to whatever CPU they got created on seemingly
fixes the issue too. This does not mean that each worker will process
work on the CPU on which it was queued, just that each worker will
remain on whatever CPU it originally got created on.

Puzzling...

Note that it is indeed quite possible that this isn't a ppc issue at
all, just shows on ppc. It could be page cache related, or it could even
be a bug in mariadb itself.

-- 
Jens Axboe