| Message ID | 20210208193410.3859094-1-weiwan@google.com |
|---|---|
| Headers | show |
| Series | implement kthread based napi poll | expand |
Hello, On Mon, 2021-02-08 at 11:34 -0800, Wei Wang wrote: > The idea of moving the napi poll process out of softirq context to a > kernel thread based context is not new. > Paolo Abeni and Hannes Frederic Sowa have proposed patches to move napi > poll to kthread back in 2016. And Felix Fietkau has also proposed > patches of similar ideas to use workqueue to process napi poll just a > few weeks ago. I'd like to explicitly thank Wei and the reviewers for all the effort done to get this merged! Nice and huge work, kudos on you! Thanks! Paolo
On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 2:34 AM Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com> wrote: > > Hello, > > On Mon, 2021-02-08 at 11:34 -0800, Wei Wang wrote: > > The idea of moving the napi poll process out of softirq context to a > > kernel thread based context is not new. > > Paolo Abeni and Hannes Frederic Sowa have proposed patches to move napi > > poll to kthread back in 2016. And Felix Fietkau has also proposed > > patches of similar ideas to use workqueue to process napi poll just a > > few weeks ago. > > I'd like to explicitly thank Wei and the reviewers for all the effort > done to get this merged! > > Nice and huge work, kudos on you! Thank you Paolo! And thanks to all the reviewers! > > Thanks! > > Paolo >
The idea of moving the napi poll process out of softirq context to a kernel thread based context is not new. Paolo Abeni and Hannes Frederic Sowa have proposed patches to move napi poll to kthread back in 2016. And Felix Fietkau has also proposed patches of similar ideas to use workqueue to process napi poll just a few weeks ago. The main reason we'd like to push forward with this idea is that the scheduler has poor visibility into cpu cycles spent in softirq context, and is not able to make optimal scheduling decisions of the user threads. For example, we see in one of the application benchmark where network load is high, the CPUs handling network softirqs has ~80% cpu util. And user threads are still scheduled on those CPUs, despite other more idle cpus available in the system. And we see very high tail latencies. In this case, we have to explicitly pin away user threads from the CPUs handling network softirqs to ensure good performance. With napi poll moved to kthread, scheduler is in charge of scheduling both the kthreads handling network load, and the user threads, and is able to make better decisions. In the previous benchmark, if we do this and we pin the kthreads processing napi poll to specific CPUs, scheduler is able to schedule user threads away from these CPUs automatically. And the reason we prefer 1 kthread per napi, instead of 1 workqueue entity per host, is that kthread is more configurable than workqueue, and we could leverage existing tuning tools for threads, like taskset, chrt, etc to tune scheduling class and cpu set, etc. Another reason is if we eventually want to provide busy poll feature using kernel threads for napi poll, kthread seems to be more suitable than workqueue. Furthermore, for large platforms with 2 NICs attached to 2 sockets, kthread is more flexible to be pinned to different sets of CPUs. In this patch series, I revived Paolo and Hannes's patch in 2016 and made modifications. Then there are changes proposed by Felix, Jakub, Paolo and myself on top of those, with suggestions from Eric Dumazet. In terms of performance, I ran tcp_rr tests with 1000 flows with various request/response sizes, with RFS/RPS disabled, and compared performance between softirq vs kthread vs workqueue (patchset proposed by Felix Fietkau). Host has 56 hyper threads and 100Gbps nic, 8 rx queues and only 1 numa node. All threads are unpinned. req/resp QPS 50%tile 90%tile 99%tile 99.9%tile softirq 1B/1B 2.75M 337us 376us 1.04ms 3.69ms kthread 1B/1B 2.67M 371us 408us 455us 550us workq 1B/1B 2.56M 384us 435us 673us 822us softirq 5KB/5KB 1.46M 678us 750us 969us 2.78ms kthread 5KB/5KB 1.44M 695us 789us 891us 1.06ms workq 5KB/5KB 1.34M 720us 905us 1.06ms 1.57ms softirq 1MB/1MB 11.0K 79ms 166ms 306ms 630ms kthread 1MB/1MB 11.0K 75ms 177ms 303ms 596ms workq 1MB/1MB 11.0K 79ms 180ms 303ms 587ms When running workqueue implementation, I found the number of threads used is usually twice as much as kthread implementation. This probably introduces higher scheduling cost, which results in higher tail latencies in most cases. I also ran an application benchmark, which performs fixed qps remote SSD read/write operations, with various sizes. Again, both with RFS/RPS disabled. The result is as follows: op_size QPS 50%tile 95%tile 99%tile 99.9%tile softirq 4K 572.6K 385us 1.5ms 3.16ms 6.41ms kthread 4K 572.6K 390us 803us 2.21ms 6.83ms workq 4k 572.6K 384us 763us 3.12ms 6.87ms softirq 64K 157.9K 736us 1.17ms 3.40ms 13.75ms kthread 64K 157.9K 745us 1.23ms 2.76ms 9.87ms workq 64K 157.9K 746us 1.23ms 2.76ms 9.96ms softirq 1M 10.98K 2.03ms 3.10ms 3.7ms 11.56ms kthread 1M 10.98K 2.13ms 3.21ms 4.02ms 13.3ms workq 1M 10.98K 2.13ms 3.20ms 3.99ms 14.12ms In this set of tests, the latency is predominant by the SSD operation. Also, the user threads are much busier compared to tcp_rr tests. We have to pin the kthreads/workqueue threads to limit to a few CPUs, to not disturb user threads, and provide some isolation. Changes since v10: Separate thread creation and threaded bit set in napi->state in patch 3. Changes since v9: Small change in napi_poll() in patch 1. Split napi_kthread_stop() functionality to add separately in napi_disable() and netif_napi_del() in patch 2. Add description for napi_set_threaded() and return dev->threaded when dev->napi_list is empty for threaded sysfs in patch 3. Changes since v8: Added description for threaded param in struct net_device in patch 2. Changes since v7: Break napi_set_threaded() into 2 parts, one to create kthread called from netif_napi_add(), the other to set threaded bit in napi_enable(), to get rid of inconsistency through all napi in 1 dev. Added documentation for /sys/class/net/<dev>/threaded. Changes since v6: Added memory barrier in napi_set_threaded(). Changed /sys/class/net/<dev>/thread to a ternary value. Change dev->threaded to a bit instead of bool. Changes since v5: Removed ASSERT_RTNL() from napi_set_threaded() and removed rtnl_lock() operation from napi_enable(). Changes since v4: Recorded the threaded setting in dev and restore it in napi_enable(). Changes since v3: Merged and rearranged patches in a logical order for easier review. Changed sysfs control to be per device. Changes since v2: Corrected typo in patch 1, and updated the cover letter with more detailed and updated test results. Changes since v1: Replaced kthread_create() with kthread_run() in patch 5 as suggested by Felix Fietkau. Changes since RFC: Renamed the kthreads to be napi/<dev>-<napi_id> in patch 5 as suggested by Hannes Frederic Sowa. Felix Fietkau (1): net: extract napi poll functionality to __napi_poll() Wei Wang (2): net: implement threaded-able napi poll loop support net: add sysfs attribute to control napi threaded mode Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-class-net | 15 ++ include/linux/netdevice.h | 23 +-- net/core/dev.c | 192 ++++++++++++++++++++-- net/core/net-sysfs.c | 40 +++++ 4 files changed, 244 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)