Thread (30 messages) flat view 30 messages, 8 authors, 2016-09-23

Re: [PATCH] softirq: let ksoftirqd do its job

From: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <hidden>
Date: 2016-08-31 19:40:56
Also in: lkml

On Wed, 31 Aug 2016 10:42:29 -0700
Eric Dumazet [off-list ref] wrote:
From: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>

A while back, Paolo and Hannes sent an RFC patch adding threaded-able
napi poll loop support : (https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/620657/) 

The problem seems to be that softirqs are very aggressive and are often
handled by the current process, even if we are under stress and that
ksoftirqd was scheduled, so that innocent threads would have more chance
to make progress.

This patch makes sure that if ksoftirq is running, we let it
perform the softirq work.

Jonathan Corbet summarized the issue in https://lwn.net/Articles/687617/

Tested:

 - NIC receiving traffic handled by CPU 0
 - UDP receiver running on CPU 0, using a single UDP socket.
 - Incoming flood of UDP packets targeting the UDP socket.

Before the patch, the UDP receiver could almost never get cpu cycles and
could only receive ~2,000 packets per second.

After the patch, cpu cycles are split 50/50 between user application and
ksoftirqd/0, and we can effectively read ~900,000 packets per second,
a huge improvement in DOS situation. (Note that more packets are now
dropped by the NIC itself, since the BH handlers get less cpu cycles to
drain RX ring buffer)
I can confirm the improvement of approx 900Kpps (no wonder people have
been complaining about DoS against UDP/DNS servers).

BUT during my extensive testing, of this patch, I also think that we
have not gotten to the bottom of this.  I was expecting to see a higher
(collective) PPS number as I add more UDP servers, but I don't.

Running many UDP netperf's with command:
 super_netperf 4 -H 198.18.50.3 -l 120 -t UDP_STREAM -T 0,0 -- -m 1472 -n -N

With 'top' I can see ksoftirq are still getting a higher %CPU time:

    PID   %CPU     TIME+  COMMAND
     3   36.5   2:28.98  ksoftirqd/0
 10724    9.6   0:01.05  netserver
 10722    9.3   0:01.05  netserver
 10723    9.3   0:01.05  netserver
 10725    9.3   0:01.05  netserver

Since the load runs in well identified threads context, an admin can
more easily tune process scheduling parameters if needed.
With this patch applied, I found that changing the UDP server process,
scheduler policy to SCHED_RR or SCHED_FIFO gave me a performance boost
from 900Kpps to 1.7Mpps, and not a single UDP packet dropped (even with
a single UDP stream, also tested with more)

Command used:
 sudo chrt --rr -p 20 $(pgrep netserver)

The scheduling picture also change a lot:

   PID  %CPU   TIME+   COMMAND
 10783  24.3  0:21.53  netserver
 10784  24.3  0:21.53  netserver
 10785  24.3  0:21.52  netserver
 10786  24.3  0:21.50  netserver
     3   2.7  3:12.18  ksoftirqd/0

 
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
Reported-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>
Reported-by: Hannes Frederic Sowa <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net
Cc: Jesper Dangaard Brouer <redacted>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Rik van Riel <redacted>
---
 kernel/softirq.c |   16 +++++++++++++++-
 1 file changed, 15 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
diff --git a/kernel/softirq.c b/kernel/softirq.c
index 17caf4b63342..8ed90e3a88d6 100644
--- a/kernel/softirq.c
+++ b/kernel/softirq.c
@@ -78,6 +78,17 @@ static void wakeup_softirqd(void)
 }
 
 /*
+ * If ksoftirqd is scheduled, we do not want to process pending softirqs
+ * right now. Let ksoftirqd handle this at its own rate, to get fairness.
+ */
+static bool ksoftirqd_running(void)
+{
+	struct task_struct *tsk = __this_cpu_read(ksoftirqd);
+
+	return tsk && (tsk->state == TASK_RUNNING);
+}
+
+/*
  * preempt_count and SOFTIRQ_OFFSET usage:
  * - preempt_count is changed by SOFTIRQ_OFFSET on entering or leaving
  *   softirq processing.
@@ -313,7 +324,7 @@ asmlinkage __visible void do_softirq(void)
 
 	pending = local_softirq_pending();
 
-	if (pending)
+	if (pending && !ksoftirqd_running())
 		do_softirq_own_stack();
 
 	local_irq_restore(flags);
@@ -340,6 +351,9 @@ void irq_enter(void)
 
 static inline void invoke_softirq(void)
 {
+	if (ksoftirqd_running())
+		return;
+
 	if (!force_irqthreads) {
 #ifdef CONFIG_HAVE_IRQ_EXIT_ON_IRQ_STACK
 		/*
-- 
Best regards,
  Jesper Dangaard Brouer
  MSc.CS, Principal Kernel Engineer at Red Hat
  Author of http://www.iptv-analyzer.org
  LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brouer
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