Re: [PATCH] IPI performance benchmark

From: Christian Borntraeger
Date: Mon Dec 11 2017 - 11:30:39 EST




On 12/11/2017 03:55 PM, Yury Norov wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 03:35:02PM +0100, Christian Borntraeger wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 12/11/2017 03:16 PM, Yury Norov wrote:
>>> This benchmark sends many IPIs in different modes and measures
>>> time for IPI delivery (first column), and total time, ie including
>>> time to acknowledge the receive by sender (second column).
>>>
>>> The scenarios are:
>>> Dry-run: do everything except actually sending IPI. Useful
>>> to estimate system overhead.
>>> Self-IPI: Send IPI to self CPU.
>>> Normal IPI: Send IPI to some other CPU.
>>> Broadcast IPI: Send broadcast IPI to all online CPUs.
>>>
>>> For virtualized guests, sending and reveiving IPIs causes guest exit.
>>> I used this test to measure performance impact on KVM subsystem of
>>> Christoffer Dall's series "Optimize KVM/ARM for VHE systems".
>>>
>>> https://www.spinics.net/lists/kvm/msg156755.html
>>>
>>> Test machine is ThunderX2, 112 online CPUs. Below the results normalized
>>> to host dry-run time. Smaller - better.
>>>
>>> Host, v4.14:
>>> Dry-run: 0 1
>>> Self-IPI: 9 18
>>> Normal IPI: 81 110
>>> Broadcast IPI: 0 2106
>>>
>>> Guest, v4.14:
>>> Dry-run: 0 1
>>> Self-IPI: 10 18
>>> Normal IPI: 305 525
>>> Broadcast IPI: 0 9729
>>>
>>> Guest, v4.14 + VHE:
>>> Dry-run: 0 1
>>> Self-IPI: 9 18
>>> Normal IPI: 176 343
>>> Broadcast IPI: 0 9885
[...]
>>> +static int __init init_bench_ipi(void)
>>> +{
>>> + ktime_t ipi, total;
>>> + int ret;
>>> +
>>> + ret = bench_ipi(NTIMES, DRY_RUN, &ipi, &total);
>>> + if (ret)
>>> + pr_err("Dry-run FAILED: %d\n", ret);
>>> + else
>>> + pr_err("Dry-run: %18llu, %18llu ns\n", ipi, total);
>>
>> you do not use NTIMES here to calculate the average value. Is that intended?
>
> I think, it's more visually to represent all results in number of dry-run
> times, like I did in patch description. So on kernel side I expose raw data
> and calculate final values after finishing tests.

I think it is highly confusing that the output from the patch description does not
match the output from the real module. So can you make that match at least?
>
> If you think that average values are preferable, I can do that in v2.

The raw numbers a propably fine, but then you might want to print the number of
loop iterations in the output.
If we want to do something fancy, we could do a combination of a smaller inner
loop doing the test, then an outer loops redoing the inner loop and then you
can do some min/max/average calculation. Not s