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Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH RFC V9 0/19] Paravirtualized ticket spinlocks



On 07/10/2013 04:03 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 02:41:30PM +0530, Raghavendra K T wrote:
On 06/26/2013 11:24 PM, Raghavendra K T wrote:
On 06/26/2013 09:41 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 07:10:21PM +0530, Raghavendra K T wrote:
On 06/26/2013 06:22 PM, Gleb Natapov wrote:
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 01:37:45PM +0200, Andrew Jones wrote:
On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 02:15:26PM +0530, Raghavendra K T wrote:
On 06/25/2013 08:20 PM, Andrew Theurer wrote:
On Sun, 2013-06-02 at 00:51 +0530, Raghavendra K T wrote:
This series replaces the existing paravirtualized spinlock
mechanism
with a paravirtualized ticketlock mechanism. The series provides
implementation for both Xen and KVM.

Changes in V9:
- Changed spin_threshold to 32k to avoid excess halt exits that are
    causing undercommit degradation (after PLE handler
improvement).
- Added  kvm_irq_delivery_to_apic (suggested by Gleb)
- Optimized halt exit path to use PLE handler

V8 of PVspinlock was posted last year. After Avi's suggestions
to look
at PLE handler's improvements, various optimizations in PLE
handling
have been tried.

Sorry for not posting this sooner.  I have tested the v9
pv-ticketlock
patches in 1x and 2x over-commit with 10-vcpu and 20-vcpu VMs.  I
have
tested these patches with and without PLE, as PLE is still not
scalable
with large VMs.


Hi Andrew,

Thanks for testing.

System: x3850X5, 40 cores, 80 threads


1x over-commit with 10-vCPU VMs (8 VMs) all running dbench:
----------------------------------------------------------
                        Total
Configuration                Throughput(MB/s)    Notes

3.10-default-ple_on            22945            5% CPU in host
kernel, 2% spin_lock in guests
3.10-default-ple_off            23184            5% CPU in host
kernel, 2% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_on            22895            5% CPU in host
kernel, 2% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_off            23051            5% CPU in host
kernel, 2% spin_lock in guests
[all 1x results look good here]

Yes. The 1x results look too close



2x over-commit with 10-vCPU VMs (16 VMs) all running dbench:
-----------------------------------------------------------
                        Total
Configuration                Throughput        Notes

3.10-default-ple_on             6287            55% CPU  host
kernel, 17% spin_lock in guests
3.10-default-ple_off             1849            2% CPU in host
kernel, 95% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_on             6691            50% CPU in host
kernel, 15% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_off            16464            8% CPU in host
kernel, 33% spin_lock in guests

I see 6.426% improvement with ple_on
and 161.87% improvement with ple_off. I think this is a very good
sign
  for the patches

[PLE hinders pv-ticket improvements, but even with PLE off,
  we still off from ideal throughput (somewhere >20000)]


Okay, The ideal throughput you are referring is getting around
atleast
80% of 1x throughput for over-commit. Yes we are still far away from
there.


1x over-commit with 20-vCPU VMs (4 VMs) all running dbench:
----------------------------------------------------------
                        Total
Configuration                Throughput        Notes

3.10-default-ple_on            22736            6% CPU in host
kernel, 3% spin_lock in guests
3.10-default-ple_off            23377            5% CPU in host
kernel, 3% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_on            22471            6% CPU in host
kernel, 3% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_off            23445            5% CPU in host
kernel, 3% spin_lock in guests
[1x looking fine here]


I see ple_off is little better here.


2x over-commit with 20-vCPU VMs (8 VMs) all running dbench:
----------------------------------------------------------
                        Total
Configuration                Throughput        Notes

3.10-default-ple_on             1965            70% CPU in host
kernel, 34% spin_lock in guests
3.10-default-ple_off              226            2% CPU in host
kernel, 94% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_on             1942            70% CPU in host
kernel, 35% spin_lock in guests
3.10-pvticket-ple_off             8003            11% CPU in host
kernel, 70% spin_lock in guests
[quite bad all around, but pv-tickets with PLE off the best so far.
  Still quite a bit off from ideal throughput]

This is again a remarkable improvement (307%).
This motivates me to add a patch to disable ple when pvspinlock is
on.
probably we can add a hypercall that disables ple in kvm init patch.
but only problem I see is what if the guests are mixed.

  (i.e one guest has pvspinlock support but other does not. Host
supports pv)

How about reintroducing the idea to create per-kvm ple_gap,ple_window
state. We were headed down that road when considering a dynamic
window at
one point. Then you can just set a single guest's ple_gap to zero,
which
would lead to PLE being disabled for that guest. We could also revisit
the dynamic window then.

Can be done, but lets understand why ple on is such a big problem.
Is it
possible that ple gap and SPIN_THRESHOLD are not tuned properly?


The one obvious reason I see is commit awareness inside the guest. for
under-commit there is no necessity to do PLE, but unfortunately we do.

atleast we return back immediately in case of potential undercommits,
but we still incur vmexit delay.
But why do we? If SPIN_THRESHOLD will be short enough (or ple windows
long enough) to not generate PLE exit we will not go into PLE handler
at all, no?


Yes. you are right. dynamic ple window was an attempt to solve it.

Probelm is, reducing the SPIN_THRESHOLD is resulting in excess halt
exits in under-commits and increasing ple_window may be sometimes
counter productive as it affects other busy-wait constructs such as
flush_tlb AFAIK.
So if we could have had a dynamically changing SPIN_THRESHOLD too, that
would be nice.


Gleb, Andrew,
I tested with the global ple window change (similar to what I posted
here https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/11/11/14 ),
This does not look global. It changes PLE per vcpu.

But did not see good result. May be it is good to go with per VM
ple_window.

Gleb,
Can you elaborate little more on what you have in mind regarding per
VM ple_window. (maintaining part of it as a per vm variable is clear
to
  me), but is it that we have to load that every time of guest entry?

Only when it changes, shouldn't be to often no?

I 'll try that idea next.

Ingo, Gleb,

 From the results perspective, Andrew Theurer, Vinod's test results are
pro-pvspinlock.
Could you please help me to know what will make it a mergeable
candidate?.

I need to spend more time reviewing it :) The problem with PV interfaces
is that they are easy to add but hard to get rid of if better solution
(HW or otherwise) appears.

Infact Avi had acked the whole V8 series, but delayed for seeing how
PLE improvement would affect it.

The only addition from that series has been
1. tuning the SPIN_THRESHOLD to 32k (from 2k)
and
2. the halt handler now calls vcpu_on_spin to take the advantage of PLE improvements. (this can also go as an independent patch into kvm)

The rationale for making SPIN_THERSHOLD 32k needs big explanation.
Before PLE improvements, as you know,
kvm undercommit scenario was very worse in ple enabled cases. (compared to ple disabled cases). pvspinlock patches behaved equally bad in undercommit. Both had similar reason so at the end there was no degradation w.r.t base.

The reason for bad performance in PLE case was unneeded vcpu iteration in ple handler resulting in high yield_to calls and double run queue locks. With pvspinlock applied, same villain role was played by excessive halt exits.

But after ple handler improved, we needed to throttle unnecessary halts
in undercommit for pvspinlock to be on par with 1x result.


I agree that Jiannan's Preemptable Lock idea is promising and we could
evaluate that  approach, and make the best one get into kernel and also
will carry on discussion with Jiannan to improve that patch.
That would be great. The work is stalled from what I can tell.

Jiannan is trying to improve that. and also 'am helping with testing
etc internally too.
Despite of being a great idea some how, hardcoded TIMEOUT to delay
the checking the lock availability is somehow not working great, and
still seeing some softlockups. AFAIK, Linus also hated TIMEOUT idea
in Rik's spinlock backoff patches because it is difficult to tune on baremetal and can have some adverse effect on virtualization too.


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