From: Jan Glauber <jan.glauber@caviumnetworks.com>
To: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>,
Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>,
Linux ARM <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>,
Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] arm64: defconfig: Raise NR_CPUS to 256
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2018 10:52:14 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20180326085214.GB5991@hc> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20180306140201.GB7428@hc>
On Tue, Mar 06, 2018 at 03:02:01PM +0100, Jan Glauber wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 06, 2018 at 02:12:29PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 2, 2018 at 3:37 PM, Jan Glauber <jglauber@cavium.com> wrote:
> > > ThunderX1 dual socket has 96 CPUs and ThunderX2 has 224 CPUs.
> >
> > Are you sure about those numbers? From my counting, I would have expected
> > twice that number in both cases: 48 cores, 2 chips and 2x SMT for ThunderX
> > vs 52 Cores, 2 chips and 4x SMT for ThunderX2.
>
> That's what I have on those machines. I counted SMT as normal CPUs as it
> doesn't make a difference for the config. I've not seen SMT on ThunderX.
>
> The ThunderX2 number of 224 is already with 4x SMT (and 2 chips) but
> there may be other versions planned that I'm not aware of.
>
> > > Therefore raise the default number of CPUs from 64 to 256
> > > by adding an arm64 specific option to override the generic default.
> >
> > Regardless of what the correct numbers for your chips are, I'd like
> > to hear some other opinions on how high we should raise that default
> > limit, both in arch/arm64/Kconfig and in the defconfig file.
> >
> > As I remember it, there is a noticeable cost for taking the limit beyond
> > BITS_PER_LONG, both in terms of memory consumption and also
> > runtime performance (copying and comparing CPU masks).
>
> OK, that explains the default. My unverified assumption is that
> increasing the CPU masks wont be a noticable performance hit.
>
> Also, I don't think that anyone who wants performance will use
> defconfig. All server distributions would bump up the NR_CPUS anyway
> and really small systems will probably need to tune the config
> anyway.
>
> For me defconfig should produce a usable system, not with every last
> driver configured but with all the basics like CPUs, networking, etc.
> fully present.
>
> > I'm sure someone will keep coming up with even larger configurations
> > in the future, so we should try to decide how far we can take the
> > defaults for the moment without impacting users of the smallest
> > systems. Alternatively, you could add some measurements that
> > show how much memory and CPU time is used up on a typical
> > configuration for a small system (4 cores, no SMT, 512 MB RAM).
> > If that's low enough, we could just do it anyway.
>
> OK, I'll take a look.
I've made some measurements on a 4 core board (Cavium 81xx) with
NR_CPUS set to 64 or 256:
- vmlinux grows by 0.04 % with 256 CPUs
- Kernel compile time was a bit faster with 256 CPUS (which does
not make sense, but at least is seems to not suffer from the change).
Is there a benchmark that will be better suited? Maybe even a
microbenchmark that will suffer from the longer cpumasks?
- Available memory decreased by 0.13% (restricted memory to 512 MB),
BSS increased 5.3 %
Cheers,
Jan
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-03-26 8:52 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-03-02 14:37 [PATCH 1/2] arm64: defconfig: enable THUNDER_NIC_VF Jan Glauber
2018-03-02 14:37 ` [PATCH 2/2] arm64: defconfig: Raise NR_CPUS to 256 Jan Glauber
2018-03-06 13:12 ` Arnd Bergmann
2018-03-06 14:02 ` Jan Glauber
2018-03-06 14:30 ` Arnd Bergmann
2018-03-26 8:52 ` Jan Glauber [this message]
2018-03-26 9:28 ` Arnd Bergmann
2018-03-26 10:02 ` Jan Glauber
2018-04-30 9:36 ` [PATCH 1/2] arm64: defconfig: enable THUNDER_NIC_VF Jan Glauber
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