Re: [RFC PATCH v3 2/7] ktask: multithread CPU-intensive kernel work

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue,  5 Dec 2017 14:52:15 -0500 Daniel Jordan <daniel.m.jordan@oracle.com> wrote:

> ktask is a generic framework for parallelizing CPU-intensive work in the
> kernel.  The intended use is for big machines that can use their CPU power to
> speed up large tasks that can't otherwise be multithreaded in userland.  The
> API is generic enough to add concurrency to many different kinds of tasks--for
> example, zeroing a range of pages or evicting a list of inodes--and aims to
> save its clients the trouble of splitting up the work, choosing the number of
> threads to use, maintaining an efficient concurrency level, starting these
> threads, and load balancing the work between them.
> 
> The Documentation patch earlier in this series has more background.
> 
> Introduces the ktask API; consumers appear in subsequent patches.
> 
> Based on work by Pavel Tatashin, Steve Sistare, and Jonathan Adams.
>
> ...
>
> --- a/init/Kconfig
> +++ b/init/Kconfig
> @@ -319,6 +319,18 @@ config AUDIT_TREE
>  	depends on AUDITSYSCALL
>  	select FSNOTIFY
>  
> +config KTASK
> +	bool "Multithread cpu-intensive kernel tasks"
> +	depends on SMP
> +	depends on NR_CPUS > 16

Why this?

It would make sense to relax (or eliminate) this at least for the
development/test period, so more people actually run and test the new
code.

> +	default n
> +	help
> +	  Parallelize expensive kernel tasks such as zeroing huge pages.  This
> +          feature is designed for big machines that can take advantage of their
> +          cpu count to speed up large kernel tasks.
> +
> +          If unsure, say 'N'.
> +
>  source "kernel/irq/Kconfig"
>  source "kernel/time/Kconfig"
>  
>
> ...
>
> +/*
> + * Initialize internal limits on work items queued.  Work items submitted to
> + * cmwq capped at 80% of online cpus both system-wide and per-node to maintain
> + * an efficient level of parallelization at these respective levels.
> + */
> +bool ktask_rlim_init(void)

Why not static __init?

> +{
> +	int node;
> +	unsigned nr_node_cpus;
> +
> +	spin_lock_init(&ktask_rlim_lock);

This can be done at compile time.  Unless there's a real reason for
ktask_rlim_init to be non-static, non-__init, in which case I'm
worried: reinitializing a static spinlock is weird.

> +	ktask_rlim_node_cur = kcalloc(num_possible_nodes(),
> +					       sizeof(size_t),
> +					       GFP_KERNEL);
> +	if (!ktask_rlim_node_cur) {
> +		pr_warn("can't alloc rlim counts (ktask disabled)");
> +		return false;
> +	}
> +
> +	ktask_rlim_node_max = kmalloc_array(num_possible_nodes(),
> +						     sizeof(size_t),
> +						     GFP_KERNEL);
> +	if (!ktask_rlim_node_max) {
> +		kfree(ktask_rlim_node_cur);
> +		pr_warn("can't alloc rlim maximums (ktask disabled)");
> +		return false;
> +	}
> +
> +	ktask_rlim_max = mult_frac(num_online_cpus(), KTASK_CPUFRAC_NUMER,
> +						      KTASK_CPUFRAC_DENOM);
> +	for_each_node(node) {
> +		nr_node_cpus = cpumask_weight(cpumask_of_node(node));
> +		ktask_rlim_node_max[node] = mult_frac(nr_node_cpus,
> +						      KTASK_CPUFRAC_NUMER,
> +						      KTASK_CPUFRAC_DENOM);
> +	}
> +
> +	return true;
> +}
>
> ...
>