rcu: Parallelize and economize NOCB kthread wakeups

An 80-CPU system with a context-switch-heavy workload can require so
many NOCB kthread wakeups that the RCU grace-period kthreads spend several
tens of percent of a CPU just awakening things.  This clearly will not
scale well: If you add enough CPUs, the RCU grace-period kthreads would
get behind, increasing grace-period latency.

To avoid this problem, this commit divides the NOCB kthreads into leaders
and followers, where the grace-period kthreads awaken the leaders each of
whom in turn awakens its followers.  By default, the number of groups of
kthreads is the square root of the number of CPUs, but this default may
be overridden using the rcutree.rcu_nocb_leader_stride boot parameter.
This reduces the number of wakeups done per grace period by the RCU
grace-period kthread by the square root of the number of CPUs, but of
course by shifting those wakeups to the leaders.  In addition, because
the leaders do grace periods on behalf of their respective followers,
the number of wakeups of the followers decreases by up to a factor of two.
Instead of being awakened once when new callbacks arrive and again
at the end of the grace period, the followers are awakened only at
the end of the grace period.

For a numerical example, in a 4096-CPU system, the grace-period kthread
would awaken 64 leaders, each of which would awaken its 63 followers
at the end of the grace period.  This compares favorably with the 79
wakeups for the grace-period kthread on an 80-CPU system.

Reported-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
index 910c3829f81d..770662c42c9f 100644
--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -2802,6 +2802,13 @@ bytes respectively. Such letter suffixes can also be entirely omitted.
                         quiescent states.  Units are jiffies, minimum
                         value is one, and maximum value is HZ.
 
+        rcutree.rcu_nocb_leader_stride= [KNL]
+                        Set the number of NOCB kthread groups, which
+                        defaults to the square root of the number of
+                        CPUs.  Larger numbers reduces the wakeup overhead
+                        on the per-CPU grace-period kthreads, but increases
+                        that same overhead on each group's leader.
+
         rcutree.qhimark= [KNL]
                         Set threshold of queued RCU callbacks beyond which
                         batch limiting is disabled.