Re: [PATCH v8 74/74] cputlb: queue async flush jobs without the BQL

[Robert Foley]

On Wed, 20 May 2020 at 00:46, Emilio G. Cota <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 09:46:36 -0400, Robert Foley wrote:
>
> Thanks for doing these tests. I know from experience that benchmarking
> is hard and incredibly time consuming, so please do not be discouraged by
> my comments below.
>

Hi,
Thanks for all the comments, and for including the script!
These are all very helpful.

We will work to replicate these results using a PPC VM,
and will re-post them here.

Thanks & Regards,
-Rob

> A couple of points:
>
> 1. I am not familiar with aarch64 KVM but I'd expect it to scale almost
> like the native run. Are you assigning enough RAM to the guest? Also,
> it can help to run the kernel build in a ramfs in the guest.

> 2. The build itself does not seem to impose a scaling limit, since
> it scales very well when run natively (per-thread I presume aarch64 TCG is
> still slower than native, even if TCG is run on a faster x86 machine).
> The limit here is probably aarch64 TCG. In particular, last time I
> checked aarch64 TCG has room for improvement scalability-wise handling
> interrupts and some TLB operations; this is likely to explain why we
> see no benefit with per-CPU locks, i.e. the bottleneck is elsewhere.
> This can be confirmed with the sync profiler.
>
> IIRC I originally used ppc64 for this test because ppc64 TCG does not
> have any other big bottlenecks scalability-wise. I just checked but
> unfortunately I can't find the ppc64 image I used :( What I can offer
> is the script I used to run these benchmarks; see the appended.
>
> Thanks,
>                 Emilio
>
> ---
> #!/bin/bash
>
> set -eu
>
> # path to host files
> MYHOME=/local/home/cota/src
>
> # guest image
> QEMU_INST_PATH=$MYHOME/qemu-inst
> IMG=$MYHOME/qemu/img/ppc64/ubuntu.qcow2
>
> ARCH=ppc64
> COMMON_ARGS="-M pseries -nodefaults \
>                 -hda $IMG -nographic -serial stdio \
>                 -net nic -net user,hostfwd=tcp::2222-:22 \
>                 -m 48G"
>
> # path to this script's directory, where .txt output will be copied
> # from the guest.
> QELT=$MYHOME/qelt
> HOST_PATH=$QELT/fig/kcomp
>
> # The guest must be able to SSH to the HOST without entering a password.
> # The way I set this up is to have a passwordless SSH key in the guest's
> # root user, and then copy that key's public key to the host.
> # I used the root user because the guest runs on bootup (as root) a
> # script that scp's run-guest.sh (see below) from the host, then executes it.
> # This is done via a tiny script in the guest invoked from systemd once
> # boot-up has completed.
> HOST=address@hidden
>
> # This is a script in the host to use an appropriate cpumask to
> # use cores in the same socket if possible.
> # See https://github.com/cota/cputopology-perl
> CPUTOPO=$MYHOME/cputopology-perl
>
> # For each run we create this file that then the guest will SCP
> # and execute. It is a quick and dirty way of passing arguments to the guest.
> create_file () {
>     TAG=$1
>     CORES=$2
>     NAME=$ARCH.$TAG-$CORES.txt
>
>     echo '#!/bin/bash' > run-guest.sh
>     echo 'cp -r /home/cota/linux-4.18-rc7 /tmp2/linux' >> run-guest.sh
>     echo "cd /tmp2/linux" >> run-guest.sh
>     echo "{ time make -j $CORES vmlinux >/dev/null; } 2>>/home/cota/$NAME" >> 
> run-guest.sh
>     # Output with execution time is then scp'ed to the host.
>     echo "ssh $HOST 'cat >> $HOST_PATH/$NAME' < /home/cota/$NAME" >> 
> run-guest.sh
>     echo "poweroff" >> run-guest.sh
> }
>
> # Change here THREADS and also the TAGS that point to different QEMU 
> installations.
> for THREADS in 64 32 16; do
>     for TAG in cpu-exclusive-work cputlb-no-bql per-cpu-lock cpu-has-work 
> baseline; do
>         QEMU=$QEMU_INST_PATH/$TAG/bin/qemu-system-$ARCH
>         CPUMASK=$($CPUTOPO/list.pl --policy=compact-smt $THREADS)
>
>         create_file $TAG $THREADS
>         time taskset -c $CPUMASK $QEMU $COMMON_ARGS -smp $THREADS
>     done
> done