rcu: Reduce cache-miss initialization latencies for large systems

Commit #0209f649 (rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout) set an upper
limit of 16 on the leaf-level fanout for the rcu_node tree.  This was
needed to reduce lock contention that was induced by the synchronization
of scheduling-clock interrupts, which was in turn needed to improve
energy efficiency for moderate-sized lightly loaded servers.

However, reducing the leaf-level fanout means that there are more
leaf-level rcu_node structures in the tree, which in turn means that
RCU's grace-period initialization incurs more cache misses.  This is
not a problem on moderate-sized servers with only a few tens of CPUs,
but becomes a major source of real-time latency spikes on systems with
many hundreds of CPUs.  In addition, the workloads running on these large
systems tend to be CPU-bound, which eliminates the energy-efficiency
advantages of synchronizing scheduling-clock interrupts.  Therefore,
these systems need maximal values for the rcu_node leaf-level fanout.

This commit addresses this problem by introducing a new kernel parameter
named RCU_FANOUT_LEAF that directly controls the leaf-level fanout.
This parameter defaults to 16 to handle the common case of a moderate
sized lightly loaded servers, but may be set higher on larger systems.

Reported-by: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Reported-by: Dimitri Sivanich <sivanich@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/rcutree.h b/kernel/rcutree.h
index cdd1be0a4072..a905c200405c 100644
--- a/kernel/rcutree.h
+++ b/kernel/rcutree.h
@@ -29,18 +29,14 @@
 #include <linux/seqlock.h>
 
 /*
- * Define shape of hierarchy based on NR_CPUS and CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT.
+ * Define shape of hierarchy based on NR_CPUS, CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT, and
+ * CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_LEAF.
  * In theory, it should be possible to add more levels straightforwardly.
  * In practice, this did work well going from three levels to four.
  * Of course, your mileage may vary.
  */
 #define MAX_RCU_LVLS 4
-#if CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT > 16
-#define RCU_FANOUT_LEAF       16
-#else /* #if CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT > 16 */
-#define RCU_FANOUT_LEAF       (CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT)
-#endif /* #else #if CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT > 16 */
-#define RCU_FANOUT_1          (RCU_FANOUT_LEAF)
+#define RCU_FANOUT_1          (CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_LEAF)
 #define RCU_FANOUT_2          (RCU_FANOUT_1 * CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT)
 #define RCU_FANOUT_3          (RCU_FANOUT_2 * CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT)
 #define RCU_FANOUT_4          (RCU_FANOUT_3 * CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT)