rcu: reduce the number of spurious RCU_SOFTIRQ invocations
authorPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:39:26 +0000 (17:39 -0700)
committerPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Mon, 10 May 2010 18:08:35 +0000 (11:08 -0700)
commitd21670acab9fcb4bc74a40b68a6941059234c55c
tree6a4c054bc4dbadf0524b4e221889a8da558dbdaf
parent4a90a0681cf6cd21cd444184302aa045156486b3
rcu: reduce the number of spurious RCU_SOFTIRQ invocations

Lai Jiangshan noted that up to 10% of the RCU_SOFTIRQ are spurious, and
traced this down to the fact that the current grace-period machinery
will uselessly raise RCU_SOFTIRQ when a given CPU needs to go through
a quiescent state, but has not yet done so.  In this situation, there
might well be nothing that RCU_SOFTIRQ can do, and the overhead can be
worth worrying about in the ksoftirqd case.  This patch therefore avoids
raising RCU_SOFTIRQ in this situation.

Changes since v1 (http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/3/30/122 from Lai Jiangshan):

o Omit the rcu_qs_pending() prechecks, as they aren't that
much less expensive than the quiescent-state checks.

o Merge with the set_need_resched() patch that reduces IPIs.

o Add the new n_rp_report_qs field to the rcu_pending tracing output.

o Update the tracing documentation accordingly.

Signed-off-by: Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Documentation/RCU/trace.txt
kernel/rcutree.c
kernel/rcutree.h
kernel/rcutree_trace.c