- The hierarchical timer pull model
When timer wheel timers are armed they are placed into the timer wheel
of a CPU which is likely to be busy at the time of expiry. This is done
to avoid wakeups on potentially idle CPUs.
This is wrong in several aspects:
1) The heuristics to select the target CPU are wrong by
definition as the chance to get the prediction right is close
to zero.
2) Due to #1 it is possible that timers are accumulated on a
single target CPU
3) The required computation in the enqueue path is just overhead for
dubious value especially under the consideration that the vast
majority of timer wheel timers are either canceled or rearmed
before they expire.
The timer pull model avoids the above by removing the target
computation on enqueue and queueing timers always on the CPU on which
they get armed.
This is achieved by having separate wheels for CPU pinned timers and
global timers which do not care about where they expire.
As long as a CPU is busy it handles both the pinned and the global
timers which are queued on the CPU local timer wheels.
When a CPU goes idle it evaluates its own timer wheels:
- If the first expiring timer is a pinned timer, then the global
timers can be ignored as the CPU will wake up before they expire.
- If the first expiring timer is a global timer, then the expiry time
is propagated into the timer pull hierarchy and the CPU makes sure
to wake up for the first pinned timer.
The timer pull hierarchy organizes CPUs in groups of eight at the
lowest level and at the next levels groups of eight groups up to the
point where no further aggregation of groups is required, i.e. the
number of levels is log8(NR_CPUS). The magic number of eight has been
established by experimention, but can be adjusted if needed.
In each group one busy CPU acts as the migrator. It's only one CPU to
avoid lock contention on remote timer wheels.
The migrator CPU checks in its own timer wheel handling whether there
are other CPUs in the group which have gone idle and have global timers
to expire. If there are global timers to expire, the migrator locks the
remote CPU timer wheel and handles the expiry.
Depending on the group level in the hierarchy this handling can require
to walk the hierarchy downwards to the CPU level.
Special care is taken when the last CPU goes idle. At this point the
CPU is the systemwide migrator at the top of the hierarchy and it
therefore cannot delegate to the hierarchy. It needs to arm its own
timer device to expire either at the first expiring timer in the
hierarchy or at the first CPU local timer, which ever expires first.
This completely removes the overhead from the enqueue path, which is
e.g. for networking a true hotpath and trades it for a slightly more
complex idle path.
This has been in development for a couple of years and the final series
has been extensively tested by various teams from silicon vendors and
ran through extensive CI.
There have been slight performance improvements observed on network
centric workloads and an Intel team confirmed that this allows them to
power down a die completely on a mult-die socket for the first time in
a mostly idle scenario.
There is only one outstanding ~1.5% regression on a specific overloaded
netperf test which is currently investigated, but the rest is either
positive or neutral performance wise and positive on the power
management side.
- Fixes for the timekeeping interpolation code for cross-timestamps:
cross-timestamps are used for PTP to get snapshots from hardware timers
and interpolated them back to clock MONOTONIC. The changes address a
few corner cases in the interpolation code which got the math and logic
wrong.
- Simplifcation of the clocksource watchdog retry logic to automatically
adjust to handle larger systems correctly instead of having more
incomprehensible command line parameters.
- Treewide consolidation of the VDSO data structures.
- The usual small improvements and cleanups all over the place.
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Merge tag 'timers-core-2024-03-10' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip
Pull timer updates from Thomas Gleixner:
"A large set of updates and features for timers and timekeeping:
- The hierarchical timer pull model
When timer wheel timers are armed they are placed into the timer
wheel of a CPU which is likely to be busy at the time of expiry.
This is done to avoid wakeups on potentially idle CPUs.
This is wrong in several aspects:
1) The heuristics to select the target CPU are wrong by
definition as the chance to get the prediction right is
close to zero.
2) Due to #1 it is possible that timers are accumulated on
a single target CPU
3) The required computation in the enqueue path is just overhead
for dubious value especially under the consideration that the
vast majority of timer wheel timers are either canceled or
rearmed before they expire.
The timer pull model avoids the above by removing the target
computation on enqueue and queueing timers always on the CPU on
which they get armed.
This is achieved by having separate wheels for CPU pinned timers
and global timers which do not care about where they expire.
As long as a CPU is busy it handles both the pinned and the global
timers which are queued on the CPU local timer wheels.
When a CPU goes idle it evaluates its own timer wheels:
- If the first expiring timer is a pinned timer, then the global
timers can be ignored as the CPU will wake up before they
expire.
- If the first expiring timer is a global timer, then the expiry
time is propagated into the timer pull hierarchy and the CPU
makes sure to wake up for the first pinned timer.
The timer pull hierarchy organizes CPUs in groups of eight at the
lowest level and at the next levels groups of eight groups up to
the point where no further aggregation of groups is required, i.e.
the number of levels is log8(NR_CPUS). The magic number of eight
has been established by experimention, but can be adjusted if
needed.
In each group one busy CPU acts as the migrator. It's only one CPU
to avoid lock contention on remote timer wheels.
The migrator CPU checks in its own timer wheel handling whether
there are other CPUs in the group which have gone idle and have
global timers to expire. If there are global timers to expire, the
migrator locks the remote CPU timer wheel and handles the expiry.
Depending on the group level in the hierarchy this handling can
require to walk the hierarchy downwards to the CPU level.
Special care is taken when the last CPU goes idle. At this point
the CPU is the systemwide migrator at the top of the hierarchy and
it therefore cannot delegate to the hierarchy. It needs to arm its
own timer device to expire either at the first expiring timer in
the hierarchy or at the first CPU local timer, which ever expires
first.
This completely removes the overhead from the enqueue path, which
is e.g. for networking a true hotpath and trades it for a slightly
more complex idle path.
This has been in development for a couple of years and the final
series has been extensively tested by various teams from silicon
vendors and ran through extensive CI.
There have been slight performance improvements observed on network
centric workloads and an Intel team confirmed that this allows them
to power down a die completely on a mult-die socket for the first
time in a mostly idle scenario.
There is only one outstanding ~1.5% regression on a specific
overloaded netperf test which is currently investigated, but the
rest is either positive or neutral performance wise and positive on
the power management side.
- Fixes for the timekeeping interpolation code for cross-timestamps:
cross-timestamps are used for PTP to get snapshots from hardware
timers and interpolated them back to clock MONOTONIC. The changes
address a few corner cases in the interpolation code which got the
math and logic wrong.
- Simplifcation of the clocksource watchdog retry logic to
automatically adjust to handle larger systems correctly instead of
having more incomprehensible command line parameters.
- Treewide consolidation of the VDSO data structures.
- The usual small improvements and cleanups all over the place"
* tag 'timers-core-2024-03-10' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip: (62 commits)
timer/migration: Fix quick check reporting late expiry
tick/sched: Fix build failure for CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMON=n
vdso/datapage: Quick fix - use asm/page-def.h for ARM64
timers: Assert no next dyntick timer look-up while CPU is offline
tick: Assume timekeeping is correctly handed over upon last offline idle call
tick: Shut down low-res tick from dying CPU
tick: Split nohz and highres features from nohz_mode
tick: Move individual bit features to debuggable mask accesses
tick: Move got_idle_tick away from common flags
tick: Assume the tick can't be stopped in NOHZ_MODE_INACTIVE mode
tick: Move broadcast cancellation up to CPUHP_AP_TICK_DYING
tick: Move tick cancellation up to CPUHP_AP_TICK_DYING
tick: Start centralizing tick related CPU hotplug operations
tick/sched: Don't clear ts::next_tick again in can_stop_idle_tick()
tick/sched: Rename tick_nohz_stop_sched_tick() to tick_nohz_full_stop_tick()
tick: Use IS_ENABLED() whenever possible
tick/sched: Remove useless oneshot ifdeffery
tick/nohz: Remove duplicate between lowres and highres handlers
tick/nohz: Remove duplicate between tick_nohz_switch_to_nohz() and tick_setup_sched_timer()
hrtimer: Select housekeeping CPU during migration
...
d08c407f71