Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 1/2] rcu: Parallelize and economize NOCB kthread wakeups

From: Amit Shah <amit.shah@redhat.com>
To: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, riel@redhat.com, mingo@kernel.org,
	laijs@cn.fujitsu.com, dipankar@in.ibm.com,
	akpm@linux-foundation.org, mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com,
	josh@joshtriplett.org, niv@us.ibm.com, tglx@linutronix.de,
	peterz@infradead.org, rostedt@goodmis.org, dhowells@redhat.com,
	edumazet@google.com, dvhart@linux.intel.com, fweisbec@gmail.com,
	oleg@redhat.com, sbw@mit.edu
Subject: Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 1/2] rcu: Parallelize and economize NOCB kthread wakeups
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 23:23:45 +0530	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20140818175345.GD31856@grmbl.mre> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20140815150402.GD4752@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

On (Fri) 15 Aug 2014 [08:04:05], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 10:54:11AM +0530, Amit Shah wrote:
> > On (Wed) 13 Aug 2014 [06:00:49], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 11:14:39AM +0530, Amit Shah wrote:
> > > > On (Tue) 12 Aug 2014 [14:41:51], Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 02:39:36PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 09:06:21AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > > > > On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 11:03:21AM +0530, Amit Shah wrote:
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > [ . . . ]
> > > > > > 
> > > > > > > > I know of only virtio-console doing this (via userspace only,
> > > > > > > > though).
> > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > As in userspace within the guest?  That would not work.  The userspace
> > > > > > > that the qemu is running in might.  There is a way to extract ftrace info
> > > > > > > from crash dumps, so one approach would be "sendkey alt-sysrq-c", then
> > > > > > > pull the buffer from the resulting dump.  For all I know, there might also
> > > > > > > be some script that uses the qemu "x" command to get at the ftrace buffer.
> > > > > > > 
> > > > > > > Again, I cannot reproduce this, and I have been through the code several
> > > > > > > times over the past few days, and am not seeing it.  I could start
> > > > > > > sending you random diagnostic patches, but it would be much better if
> > > > > > > we could get the trace data from the failure.
> > > > 
> > > > I think the only recourse I now have is to dump the guest state from
> > > > qemu, and attempt to find the ftrace buffers by poking pages and
> > > > finding some ftrace-like struct... and then dumping the buffers.
> > > 
> > > The data exists in the qemu guest state, so it would be good to have
> > > it one way or another.  My current (perhaps self-serving) guess is that
> > > you have come up with a way to trick qemu into dropping IPIs.
> > 
> > I didn't get around to doing this yet; will get to it next week.
> > 
> > In the meantime, I tried this on RHEL6 (with RHEL6 qemu and gcc and
> > seabios), and that exhibits the problem similarly with my .config.
> 
> And I am running my tests successfully on an x86_64 system running
> Ubuntu 12.04.  Some testing on 14.04 seems to require booting with
> acpi=off, leading to my perhaps self-serving guess above.

It looks like Ubuntu 12.04 has a choice of multiple kernels.  Which
one are you running?

Also, is there a chance you could try this on a RHEL6 box?

Thanks,

		Amit