Re: [PATCH bpf-next v2 0/4] Add ftrace direct call for arm64

[wuqiang <wuqiang.matt@bytedance.com>]

On 2022/10/22 00:49, Florent Revest wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 1:32 PM Masami Hiramatsu <mhiramat@kernel.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, 17 Oct 2022 19:55:06 +0200
>> Florent Revest <revest@chromium.org> wrote:
>>> Mark finished an implementation of his per-callsite-ops and min-args
>>> branches (meaning that we can now skip the expensive ftrace's saving
>>> of all registers and iteration over all ops if only one is attached)
>>> - https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mark/linux.git/log/?h=arm64-ftrace-call-ops-20221017
>>>
>>> And Masami wrote similar patches to what I had originally done to
>>> fprobe in my branch:
>>> - https://github.com/mhiramat/linux/commits/kprobes/fprobe-update
>>>
>>> So I could rebase my previous "bpf on fprobe" branch on top of these:
>>> (as before, it's just good enough for benchmarking and to give a
>>> general sense of the idea, not for a thorough code review):
>>> - https://github.com/FlorentRevest/linux/commits/fprobe-min-args-3
>>>
>>> And I could run the benchmarks against my rpi4. I have different
>>> baseline numbers as Xu so I ran everything again and tried to keep the
>>> format the same. "indirect call" refers to my branch I just linked and
>>> "direct call" refers to the series this is a reply to (Xu's work)
>>
>> Thanks for sharing the measurement results. Yes, fprobes/rethook
>> implementation is just porting the kretprobes implementation, thus
>> it may not be so optimized.
>>
>> BTW, I remember Wuqiang's patch for kretprobes.
>>
>> https://lore.kernel.org/all/20210830173324.32507-1-wuqiang.matt@bytedance.com/T/#u
> 
> Oh that's a great idea, thanks for pointing it out Masami!
> 
>> This is for the scalability fixing, but may possible to improve
>> the performance a bit. It is not hard to port to the recent kernel.
>> Can you try it too?
> 
> I rebased it on my branch
> https://github.com/FlorentRevest/linux/commits/fprobe-min-args-3
> 
> And I got measurements again. Unfortunately it looks like this does not help :/
> 
> New benchmark results: https://paste.debian.net/1257856/
> New perf report: https://paste.debian.net/1257859/
> 
> The fprobe based approach is still significantly slower than the
> direct call approach.

FYI, a new version was released, basing on ring-array, which brings a 6.96%
increase in throughput of 1-thread case for ARM64.

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20221108071443.258794-1-wuqiang.matt@bytedance.com/

Could you share more details of the test ? I'll give it a try.

>> Anyway, eventually, I would like to remove the current kretprobe
>> based implementation and unify fexit hook with function-graph
>> tracer. It should make more better perfromance on it.
> 
> That makes sense. :) How do you imagine the unified solution ?
> Would both the fgraph and fprobe APIs keep existing but under the hood
> one would be implemented on the other ? (or would one be gone ?) Would
> we replace the rethook freelist with the function graph's per-task
> shadow stacks ? (or the other way around ?))

How about a private pool designate for local cpu ? If the fprobed routine
sticks to the same CPU when returning, the object allocation and reclaim
can go a quick path, that should bring same performance as shadow stack.
Otherwise the return of an object will go a slow path (slow as current
freelist or objpool).

>>> Note that I can't really make sense of the perf report with indirect
>>> calls. it always reports it spent 12% of the time in
>>> rethook_trampoline_handler but I verified with both a WARN in that
>>> function and a breakpoint with a debugger, this function does *not*
>>> get called when running this "bench trig-fentry" benchmark. Also it
>>> wouldn't make sense for fprobe_handler to call it so I'm quite
>>> confused why perf would report this call and such a long time spent
>>> there. Anyone know what I could be missing here ?
> 
> I made slight progress on this. If I put the vmlinux file in the cwd
> where I run perf report, the reports no longer contain references to
> rethook_trampoline_handler. Instead, they have a few
> 0xffff800008xxxxxx addresses under fprobe_handler. (like in the
> pastebin I just linked)
> 
> It's still pretty weird because that range is the vmalloc area on
> arm64 and I don't understand why anything under fprobe_handler would
> execute there. However, I'm also definitely sure that these 12% are
> actually spent getting buffers from the rethook memory pool because if
> I replace rethook_try_get and rethook_recycle calls with the usage of
> a dummy static bss buffer (for the sake of benchmarking the
> "theoretical best case scenario") these weird perf report traces are
> gone and the 12% are saved. https://paste.debian.net/1257862/
> 
> This is why I would be interested in seeing rethook's memory pool
> reimplemented on top of something like
> https://lwn.net/Articles/788923/ If we get closer to the performance
> of the the theoretical best case scenario where getting a blob of
> memory is ~free (and I think it could be the case with a per task
> shadow stack like fgraph's), then a bpf on fprobe implementation would
> start to approach the performances of a direct called trampoline on
> arm64: https://paste.debian.net/1257863/


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