Re: [PATCH] hrtimer: Update softirq_expires_next correctly after __hrtimer_get_next_event()

[Lorenzo Colitti]

On Wed, Apr 14, 2021 at 2:14 AM Greg KH <gregkh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> To give context, the commit is now 46eb1701c046 ("hrtimer: Update
> softirq_expires_next correctly after __hrtimer_get_next_event()") and is
> attached below.
>
> The f_ncm.c driver is doing a lot of calls to hrtimer_start() with mode
> HRTIMER_MODE_REL_SOFT for I think every packet it gets.  If that should
> not be happening, we can easily fix it but I guess no one has actually
> had fast USB devices that noticed this until now :)

AIUI the purpose of this timer is to support packet aggregation. USB
transfers are relatively expensive/high latency. 6 Gbps is 500k
1500-byte packets per second, or one every 2us. So f_ncm buffers as
many packets as will fit into 16k (usually, 10 1500-byte packets), and
only initiates a USB transfer when those packets have arrived. That
ends up doing only one transfer every 20us. It sets a 300us timer to
ensure that if the 10 packets haven't arrived, it still sends out
whatever it has when the timer fires. The timer is set/updated on
every packet buffered by ncm.

Is this somehow much more expensive in 5.10.24 than it was before?
Even if this driver is somehow "holding it wrong", might there not be
other workloads that have a similar problem? What about regressions on
those workloads?