Re: [PATCH 02/27] sched/isolation: Introduce housekeeping per-cpu rwsem

From: Waiman Long
Date: Thu Jun 26 2025 - 20:12:14 EST


On 6/25/25 11:50 AM, Phil Auld wrote:
On Wed, Jun 25, 2025 at 04:34:18PM +0200 Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
Le Wed, Jun 25, 2025 at 08:18:50AM -0400, Phil Auld a écrit :
Hi Waiman,

On Mon, Jun 23, 2025 at 01:34:58PM -0400 Waiman Long wrote:
On 6/20/25 11:22 AM, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
The HK_TYPE_DOMAIN isolation cpumask, and further the
HK_TYPE_KERNEL_NOISE cpumask will be made modifiable at runtime in the
future.

The affected subsystems will need to synchronize against those cpumask
changes so that:

* The reader get a coherent snapshot
* The housekeeping subsystem can safely propagate a cpumask update to
the susbsytems after it has been published.

Protect against readsides that can sleep with per-cpu rwsem. Updates are
expected to be very rare given that CPU isolation is a niche usecase and
related cpuset setup happen only in preparation work. On the other hand
read sides can occur in more frequent paths.

Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@xxxxxxxxxx>
Thanks for the patch series and it certainly has some good ideas. However I
am a bit concern about the overhead of using percpu-rwsem for
synchronization especially when the readers have to wait for the completion
on the writer side. From my point of view, during the transition period when
new isolated CPUs are being added or old ones being removed, the reader will
either get the old CPU data or the new one depending on the exact timing.
The effect the CPU selection may persist for a while after the end of the
critical section.

Can we just rely on RCU to make sure that it either get the new one or the
old one but nothing in between without the additional overhead?

My current thinking is to make use CPU hotplug to enable better CPU
isolation. IOW, I would shut down the affected CPUs, change the housekeeping
masks and then bring them back online again. That means the writer side will
take a while to complete.
The problem with this approach is that offlining a cpu effects all the other
cpus and causes latency spikes on other low latency tasks which may already be
running on other parts of the system.

I just don't want us to finally get to dynamic isolation and have it not
usable for the usecases asking for it.
We'll have to discuss that eventually because that's the plan for nohz_full.
We can work around the stop machine rendez-vous on nohz_full if that's the
problem. If the issue is not to interrupt common RT-tasks, then that's a
different problem for which I don't have a solution.

My understanding is that it's the stop machine issue. If you have a way
around that then great!

My current thinking is to just run a selected set of CPUHP teardown and startup methods relevant to housekeeping cpumasks usage without calling the full set from CPUHP_ONLINE to CPUHP_OFFLINE. I don't know if it is possible or not or how much additional changes will be needed to make that possible. That will skip the CPUHP_TEARDOWN_CPU teardown method that is likely the cause of most the latency spike experienced by other CPUs.

Cheers,
Longman