Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] softirq: Per vector threading v3

[Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 2018-01-23 at 09:42 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 8:57 AM, Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Or is it that the workqueue execution is simply not yielding for some
> > > reason?
> > 
> > It's like that.
> > 
> > I spent little time on it, so I haven't many data point. I'll try to
> > investigate the scenario later this week.
> 
> Hmm. workqueues seem to use cond_resched_rcu_qs(), which does a
> cond_resched() (and a RCU quiescent note).
> 
> But I wonder if the test triggers the "lets run lots of workqueue
> threads", and then the single-threaded user space just gets blown out
> of the water by many kernel threads. Each thread gets its own "fair"
> amount of CPU, but..

Niklas suggested a possible relation with CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y
and indeed he was right.

The patched kernel under test had CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING set, and
very little CPU time was accounted to the kworker:

[2125 is the relevant kworker's pid]
grep sum_exec_runtime /proc/2125/sched; sleep 10; grep sum_exec_runtime /proc/2125/sched
se.sum_exec_runtime                          :         13408.239286
se.sum_exec_runtime                          :         13456.907197

despite such process was processing a lot of packets and basically
burning a CPU.

Switching CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING off I see the expected behaviour:
top reports that the user space process and kworker share the CPU
almost fairly and the user space process is able to receive a
reasonable amount of packets.

Paolo