Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] epoll: use rwlock in order to reduce ep_poll_callback() contention

[Roman Penyaev]

On 2018-12-06 00:46, Eric Wong wrote:
> Roman Penyaev <rpenyaev@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > The goal of this patch is to reduce contention of ep_poll_callback() 
> > which
> > can be called concurrently from different CPUs in case of high events
> > rates and many fds per epoll.  Problem can be very well reproduced by
> > generating events (write to pipe or eventfd) from many threads, while
> > consumer thread does polling.  In other words this patch increases the
> > bandwidth of events which can be delivered from sources to the poller 
> > by
> > adding poll items in a lockless way to the list.
>
> Hi Roman,
>
> I also tried to solve this problem many years ago with help of
> the well-tested-in-userspace wfcqueue from Mathieu's URCU.
>
> I was also looking to solve contention with parallel epoll_wait
> callers with this.  AFAIK, it worked well; but needed the
> userspace tests from wfcqueue ported over to the kernel and more
> review.
>
> I didn't have enough computing power to show the real-world
> benefits or funding to continue:
>
> 	https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/?q=wfcqueue+d:..20130501

Hi Eric,

Nice work.  That was a huge change by itself and by dependency
on wfcqueue.  I could not find any valuable discussion on this,
what was the reaction of the community?


> It might not be too much trouble for you to brush up the wait-free
> patches and test them against the rwlock implementation.

Ha :)  I may try to cherry-pick these patches, let's see how many
conflicts I have to resolve, eventpoll.c has been changed a lot
since that (6 years passed, right?)

But reading your work description I can assume that epoll_wait() calls
should be faster, because they do not content with ep_poll_callback(),
and I did not try to solve this, only contention between producers,
which make my change tiny.

I also found your https://yhbt.net/eponeshotmt.c , where you count
number of bare epoll_wait() calls, which IMO is not correct, because
we need to count how many events are delivered, but not how fast
you've returned from epoll_wait().  But as I said no doubts that
getting rid of contention between consumer and producers will show
even better results.

--
Roman