Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] cgroup aware workqueues

From: Michael Rapoport
Date: Thu Mar 31 2016 - 02:17:41 EST


Hello,

> Tejun Heo <htejun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote on 03/30/2016 08:04:19 PM:
>
> Hello,
>
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 09:58:39AM +0200, Michael Rapoport wrote:
> > I did some performance evaluation of different threading models in
vhost,
> > and in most tests replacing vhost kthread's with workqueues degrades
the
> > performance. Moreover, having thread management inside the vhost
provides
>
> There really shouldn't be any difference when using unbound
> workqueues. workqueue becomes a convenience thing which manages
> worker pools and there shouldn't be any difference between workqueue
> workers and kthreads in terms of behavior.

I agree that there really shouldn't be any performance difference, but the
tests I've run show otherwise. I have no idea why and I hadn't time yet to
investigate it.

> > opportunity for optimization, at least for some workloads...
>
> What sort of optimizations are we talking about?

Well, if we take Evlis (1) as for the theoretical base, there could be
benefit of doing I/O scheduling inside the vhost.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc13/atc13-harel.pdf

> Thanks.
>
> --
> tejun

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.