Re: [PATCH RFC] rds: ib: Reduce the contention caused by the asynchronous workers to flush the mr pool

[Santosh Shilimkar <santosh.shilimkar@oracle.com>]

On Jan 18, 2022, at 11:17 AM, Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@ziepe.ca> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jan 18, 2022 at 04:48:43PM +0000, Santosh Shilimkar wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jan 18, 2022, at 6:47 AM, Praveen Kannoju <praveen.kannoju@oracle.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> This patch aims to reduce the number of asynchronous workers being spawned
>>> to execute the function "rds_ib_flush_mr_pool" during the high I/O
>>> situations. Synchronous call path's to this function "rds_ib_flush_mr_pool"
>>> will be executed without being disturbed. By reducing the number of
>>> processes contending to flush the mr pool, the total number of D state
>>> processes waiting to acquire the mutex lock will be greatly reduced, which
>>> otherwise were causing DB instance crash as the corresponding processes
>>> were not progressing while waiting to acquire the mutex lock.
>>> 
>>> Signed-off-by: Praveen Kumar Kannoju <praveen.kannoju@oracle.com>
>>> —
>>> 
>> […]
>> 
>>> diff --git a/net/rds/ib_rdma.c b/net/rds/ib_rdma.c
>>> index 8f070ee..6b640b5 100644
>>> +++ b/net/rds/ib_rdma.c
>>> @@ -393,6 +393,8 @@ int rds_ib_flush_mr_pool(struct rds_ib_mr_pool *pool,
>>> 	 */
>>> 	dirty_to_clean = llist_append_to_list(&pool->drop_list, &unmap_list);
>>> 	dirty_to_clean += llist_append_to_list(&pool->free_list, &unmap_list);
>>> +	WRITE_ONCE(pool->flush_ongoing, true);
>>> +	smp_wmb();
>>> 	if (free_all) {
>>> 		unsigned long flags;
>>> 
>>> @@ -430,6 +432,8 @@ int rds_ib_flush_mr_pool(struct rds_ib_mr_pool *pool,
>>> 	atomic_sub(nfreed, &pool->item_count);
>>> 
>>> out:
>>> +	WRITE_ONCE(pool->flush_ongoing, false);
>>> +	smp_wmb();
>>> 	mutex_unlock(&pool->flush_lock);
>>> 	if (waitqueue_active(&pool->flush_wait))
>>> 		wake_up(&pool->flush_wait);
>>> @@ -507,8 +511,17 @@ void rds_ib_free_mr(void *trans_private, int invalidate)
>>> 
>>> 	/* If we've pinned too many pages, request a flush */
>>> 	if (atomic_read(&pool->free_pinned) >= pool->max_free_pinned ||
>>> -	    atomic_read(&pool->dirty_count) >= pool->max_items / 5)
>>> -		queue_delayed_work(rds_ib_mr_wq, &pool->flush_worker, 10);
>>> +	    atomic_read(&pool->dirty_count) >= pool->max_items / 5) {
>>> +		smp_rmb();
>> You won’t need these explicit barriers since above atomic and write once already
>> issue them.
> 
> No, they don't. Use smp_store_release() and smp_load_acquire if you
> want to do something like this, but I still can't quite figure out if
> this usage of unlocked memory accesses makes any sense at all.
> 
Indeed, I see that now, thanks. Yeah, these multi variable checks can indeed
be racy but they are under lock at least for this code path. But there are few
hot path places where single variable states are evaluated atomically instead of
heavy lock. 

Regards,
Santosh