Overhead of arm64 LSE per-CPU atomics?

[Catalin Marinas]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 12:39:41PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 06:30:31PM +0000, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 30, 2025 at 03:37:00PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > To make event tracing safe for PREEMPT_RT kernels, I have been creating
> > > optimized variants of SRCU readers that use per-CPU atomics.  This works
> > > quite well, but on ARM Neoverse V2, I am seeing about 100ns for a
> > > srcu_read_lock()/srcu_read_unlock() pair, or about 50ns for a single
> > > per-CPU atomic operation.  This contrasts with a handful of nanoseconds
> > > on x86 and similar on ARM for a atomic_set(&foo, atomic_read(&foo) + 1).
> > 
> > That's quite a difference. Does it get any better if
> > CONFIG_ARM64_LSE_ATOMICS is disabled? We don't have a way to disable it
> > on the kernel command line.
> 
> In other words, build with CONFIG_ARM64_USE_LSE_ATOMICS=n, correct?

Yes.

> Yes, this gets me more than an order of magnitude, and about 30% better
> than my workaround of disabling interrupts around a non-atomic increment
> of those counters, thank you!
> 
> Given that per-CPU atomics are usually not heavily contended, would it
> make sense to avoid LSE in that case?

In theory the LSE atomics should be as fast but microarchitecture
decisions likely did not cover all the use-cases. I'll raise this
internally as well, maybe we get some ideas from the hardware people.

> And I need to figure out whether I should recommend that Meta build
> its arm64 kernels with CONFIG_ARM64_USE_LSE_ATOMICS=n.  And advice you
> might have would be deeply appreciated!  (I am of course also following
> up internally.)

I wouldn't advise turning them off just yet, they are beneficial for
other use-cases. But it needs more thinking (and not that late at night ;)).

> > Interestingly, we had this patch recently to force a prefetch before the
> > atomic:
> > 
> > https://lore.kernel.org/all/20250724120651.27983-1-yangyicong@huawei.com/
> > 
> > We rejected it but I wonder whether it improves the SRCU scenario.
> 
> No statistical difference on my system.  This is a 72-CPU Neoverse V2, in
> case that matters.

I just realised that patch doesn't touch percpu.h at all. So what about
something like (untested):

-----------------8<------------------------
diff --git a/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h b/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h
index 9abcc8ef3087..e381034324e1 100644
--- a/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h
+++ b/arch/arm64/include/asm/percpu.h
@@ -70,6 +70,7 @@ __percpu_##name##_case_##sz(void *ptr, unsigned long val)		\
 	unsigned int loop;						\
 	u##sz tmp;							\
 									\
+	asm volatile("prfm pstl1strm, %a0\n" : : "p" (ptr));
 	asm volatile (ARM64_LSE_ATOMIC_INSN(				\
 	/* LL/SC */							\
 	"1:	ldxr" #sfx "\t%" #w "[tmp], %[ptr]\n"			\
@@ -91,6 +92,7 @@ __percpu_##name##_return_case_##sz(void *ptr, unsigned long val)	\
 	unsigned int loop;						\
 	u##sz ret;							\
 									\
+	asm volatile("prfm pstl1strm, %a0\n" : : "p" (ptr));
 	asm volatile (ARM64_LSE_ATOMIC_INSN(				\
 	/* LL/SC */							\
 	"1:	ldxr" #sfx "\t%" #w "[ret], %[ptr]\n"			\
-----------------8<------------------------

> Here are my results for the underlying this_cpu_inc()
> and this_cpu_dec() pair of operations:
> 
> 	LSE Atomics Enabled (Stock)	LSE Atomics Disabled
> 
> Without Yicong’s Patch (Stock)
> 
> 			    110.786		       9.852
> 
> With Yicong’s Patch
> 
> 			    109.873		       9.853
> 
> As you can see, disabling LSE gets about an order of magnitude
> and Yicong's patch has no statistically significant effect.
> 
> This and more can be found in the "Per-CPU Increment/Decrement"
> section of this Google document:
> 
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RoYRrTsabdeTXcldzpoMnpmmCjGbJNWtDXN6ZNr_4H8/edit?usp=sharing
> 
> Full disclosure: Calls to srcu_read_lock_fast() followed by
> srcu_read_unlock_fast() really use one this_cpu_inc() followed by another
> this_cpu_inc(), but I am not seeing any difference between the two.
> And testing the underlying primitives allows my tests to give reproducible
> results regardless of what state I have the SRCU code in.  ;-)

Thanks. I'll go through your emails in more detail tomorrow/Monday.

-- 
Catalin