[resend] Timer broadcast question

[Daniel Lezcano]

On 02/21/2013 07:19 AM, Santosh Shilimkar wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 February 2013 11:51 PM, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
>> On 02/19/2013 07:10 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>>> On Tue, 19 Feb 2013, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
>>>> I am working on identifying the different wakeup sources from the
>>>> interrupts and I have a question regarding the timer broadcast.
>>>>
>>>> The broadcast timer is setup to the next event and that will wake up
>>>> any
>>>> idle cpu belonging to the "broadcast cpumask", right ?
>>>>
>>>> The cpu which has been woken up will look for each cpu the next-event
>>>> and send an IPI to wake it up.
>>>>
>>>> Although, it is possible the sender of this IPI may not be concerned by
>>>> the timer expiration and has been woken up just for sending the IPI,
>>>> right ?
>>>
>>> Correct.
>>>
>>>> If this is correct, is it possible to setup the timer irq affinity to a
>>>> cpu which will be concerned by the timer expiration ? so we prevent an
>>>> unnecessary wake up for a cpu.
>>>
>>> It is possible, but we never implemented it.
>>>
>>> If we go there, we want to make that conditional on a property flag,
>>> because some interrupt controllers especially on x86 only allow to
>>> move the affinity from interrupt context, which is pointless.
>>
>> Thanks Thomas for your quick answer. I will write a RFC patchset.
>>
> Last year I implemented the affinity hook for broad-cast code and
> experimented with it. Since the system I was using was dual core,
> it wasn't much beneficial and hence gave up later. I did remember
> discussing the approach with few folks in the conference.

I did a brief test with a similar patch on a ARM u8500 board. The timer
is tied with CPU0 by default, setting the dynamic irq affinity reduce
considerably the number of IPI. The difference with your patch is the
affinity is set to one CPU, the first one which is supposed to be wake
up by the timer expiration.

This is easy to spot with a small program doing usleep wired on CPU1.

We see CPU0 waking up to send an IPI to CPU1 and going to idle again.

I don't know how that behaves with OMAP4 with this patch (which I guess
it is the board you used), but the coupled idle state traces could be
ambiguous if you relied on it to check the benefit of this patch.

IMO, it is worth to implement such solution and perhaps we can extend it
to optimize the package idle time with the generic power domain tied
with the irq. Anyway, it is a random thought let's see that later :)

> Patch in the end of the email (also attached) for generic broadcast
> code. I didn't look at all corner case though. In arch code then
> you need to setup "broadcast_affinity" hook which should be able
> to get handle of the arch irqchip and call the respective affinity
> handler. Just 3 lines function should do the trick.
> 
> As Thomas said, effectiveness of such optimization solely depends
> on how well the affinity (in low powers) supported by your IRQ chip.
> 
> Hope this is helpful for you.

Thanks a lot for your patch and your feedbacks.

  -- Daniel


> 
> From d70f2d48ec08a3f1d73187c49b16e4e60f81a50c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> From: Santosh Shilimkar <santosh.shilimkar at ti.com>
> Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2012 03:42:33 +0530
> Subject: [PATCH] tick-broadcast: Add tick road-cast affinity suport
> 
> Current tick broad-cast code has affinity set to the boot CPU and hence
> the boot CPU will always wakeup from low power states when broad cast timer
> is armed even if the next expiry event doesn't belong to it.
> 
> Patch adds broadcast affinity functionality to avoid above and let the
> tick framework set the affinity of the event for the CPU it belongs.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Santosh Shilimkar <santosh.shilimkar at ti.com>
> ---
>  include/linux/clockchips.h   |    2 ++
>  kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c |   13 ++++++++++++-
>  2 files changed, 14 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> 
> diff --git a/include/linux/clockchips.h b/include/linux/clockchips.h
> index 8a7096f..5488cdc 100644
> --- a/include/linux/clockchips.h
> +++ b/include/linux/clockchips.h
> @@ -95,6 +95,8 @@ struct clock_event_device {
>      unsigned long        retries;
> 
>      void            (*broadcast)(const struct cpumask *mask);
> +    void            (*broadcast_affinity)
> +                    (const struct cpumask *mask, int irq);
>      void            (*set_mode)(enum clock_event_mode mode,
>                          struct clock_event_device *);
>      void            (*suspend)(struct clock_event_device *);
> diff --git a/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c b/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c
> index f113755..2ec2425 100644
> --- a/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c
> +++ b/kernel/time/tick-broadcast.c
> @@ -39,6 +39,8 @@ static void tick_broadcast_clear_oneshot(int cpu);
>  static inline void tick_broadcast_clear_oneshot(int cpu) { }
>  #endif
> 
> +static inline void dummy_broadcast_affinity(const struct cpumask *mask,
> +                            int irq) { }
>  /*
>   * Debugging: see timer_list.c
>   */
> @@ -485,14 +487,19 @@ void tick_broadcast_oneshot_control(unsigned long
> reason)
>          if (!cpumask_test_cpu(cpu, tick_get_broadcast_oneshot_mask())) {
>              cpumask_set_cpu(cpu, tick_get_broadcast_oneshot_mask());
>              clockevents_set_mode(dev, CLOCK_EVT_MODE_SHUTDOWN);
> -            if (dev->next_event.tv64 < bc->next_event.tv64)
> +            if (dev->next_event.tv64 < bc->next_event.tv64) {
>                  tick_broadcast_set_event(dev->next_event, 1);
> +                bc->broadcast_affinity(
> +                tick_get_broadcast_oneshot_mask(), bc->irq);
> +            }
>          }
>      } else {
>          if (cpumask_test_cpu(cpu, tick_get_broadcast_oneshot_mask())) {
>              cpumask_clear_cpu(cpu,
>                        tick_get_broadcast_oneshot_mask());
>              clockevents_set_mode(dev, CLOCK_EVT_MODE_ONESHOT);
> +            bc->broadcast_affinity(
> +                tick_get_broadcast_oneshot_mask(), bc->irq);
>              if (dev->next_event.tv64 != KTIME_MAX)
>                  tick_program_event(dev->next_event, 1);
>          }
> @@ -536,6 +543,10 @@ void tick_broadcast_setup_oneshot(struct
> clock_event_device *bc)
> 
>          bc->event_handler = tick_handle_oneshot_broadcast;
> 
> +        /* setup dummy broadcast affinity handler if not provided */
> +        if (bc->broadcast_affinity)
> +            bc->broadcast_affinity = dummy_broadcast_affinity;
> +
>          /* Take the do_timer update */
>          tick_do_timer_cpu = cpu;
> 


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