tick: Add tick skew boot option

Let the user decide whether power consumption or jitter is the
more important consideration for their machines.

Quoting removal commit af5ab277de:

"Historically, Linux has tried to make the regular timer tick on the
 various CPUs not happen at the same time, to avoid contention on
 xtime_lock.
    
 Nowadays, with the tickless kernel, this contention no longer happens
 since time keeping and updating are done differently. In addition,
 this skew is actually hurting power consumption in a measurable way on
 many-core systems."

Problems:

- Contrary to the above, systems do encounter contention on both
  xtime_lock and RCU structure locks when the tick is synchronized.
  
- Moderate sized RT systems suffer intolerable jitter due to the tick
  being synchronized.

- SGI reports the same for their large systems.

- Fully utilized systems reap no power saving benefit from skew removal,
  but do suffer from resulting induced lock contention.

- 0209f649 rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout
  This patch was born to combat lock contention which testing showed
  to have been _induced by_ skew removal.  Skew the tick, contention
  disappeared virtually completely.

Signed-off-by: Mike Galbraith <mgalbraith@suse.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1336472458.21924.78.camel@marge.simpson.net
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
This commit is contained in:
Mike Galbraith 2012-05-08 12:20:58 +02:00 committed by Thomas Gleixner
parent ce004178be
commit 5307c9556b
2 changed files with 27 additions and 0 deletions

View file

@ -2532,6 +2532,15 @@ bytes respectively. Such letter suffixes can also be entirely omitted.
sched_debug [KNL] Enables verbose scheduler debug messages.
skew_tick= [KNL] Offset the periodic timer tick per cpu to mitigate
xtime_lock contention on larger systems, and/or RCU lock
contention on all systems with CONFIG_MAXSMP set.
Format: { "0" | "1" }
0 -- disable. (may be 1 via CONFIG_CMDLINE="skew_tick=1"
1 -- enable.
Note: increases power consumption, thus should only be
enabled if running jitter sensitive (HPC/RT) workloads.
security= [SECURITY] Choose a security module to enable at boot.
If this boot parameter is not specified, only the first
security module asking for security registration will be

View file

@ -814,6 +814,8 @@ static enum hrtimer_restart tick_sched_timer(struct hrtimer *timer)
return HRTIMER_RESTART;
}
static int sched_skew_tick;
/**
* tick_setup_sched_timer - setup the tick emulation timer
*/
@ -831,6 +833,14 @@ void tick_setup_sched_timer(void)
/* Get the next period (per cpu) */
hrtimer_set_expires(&ts->sched_timer, tick_init_jiffy_update());
/* Offset the tick to avert xtime_lock contention. */
if (sched_skew_tick) {
u64 offset = ktime_to_ns(tick_period) >> 1;
do_div(offset, num_possible_cpus());
offset *= smp_processor_id();
hrtimer_add_expires_ns(&ts->sched_timer, offset);
}
for (;;) {
hrtimer_forward(&ts->sched_timer, now, tick_period);
hrtimer_start_expires(&ts->sched_timer,
@ -910,3 +920,11 @@ int tick_check_oneshot_change(int allow_nohz)
tick_nohz_switch_to_nohz();
return 0;
}
static int __init skew_tick(char *str)
{
get_option(&str, &sched_skew_tick);
return 0;
}
early_param("skew_tick", skew_tick);