IRQ / SoftIRQ CPU time accounting broken by 457533a7d3402d1d91fbc125c8bd1bd16dcd3cd4

From: Andrew Gallatin
Date: Thu Apr 23 2009 - 10:52:57 EST


When running netperf for some 10GbE tests, I noticed
that IRQ and SOFTIRQ CPU time is no longer reported for an
otherwise idle CPU on recent kernels, at least for x86_64.

If I take a 2-CPU system, and bind the NIC IRQ to CPU0, and
bind the user-space netserver daemon to CPU1, the problem
is obvious when blasting 10Gb/s of traffic at it. I see
no CPU used for irq or softirq on CPU0, even though it is
handling 13K interrupts/sec:



% mpstat -P 0 1
Linux 2.6.30-rc1 (venice) 04/22/09

11:25:25 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %irq %soft %idle intr/s
11:25:26 0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00 13248.00
11:25:27 0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 100.00 13280.00

Common sense tells me that is wrong, and oprofile verifies there is
a lot happening on CPU0. Further, when I run a cpu-soaker in
usermode bound to CPU0, I start to see irq, softirq, etc,
being correctly identified:

11:28:02 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %irq %soft %idle intr/s
11:28:03 0 45.10 0.00 0.00 0.00 1.96 52.94 0.00 13019.61
11:28:04 0 46.46 0.00 0.00 0.00 2.02 51.52 0.00 13414.14

The problem is observable, but much less obvious when using a more
common, e1000 1GbE NIC (15% softirq is missing, rather than 50%).

I spent a few hours git-bisecting until I finally got here:

% git-bisect bad
Bisecting: 0 revisions left to test after this
[457533a7d3402d1d91fbc125c8bd1bd16dcd3cd4] fix scaled & unscaled cputime accounting

I have neither CONFIG_NO_HZ, CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING, or XEN configured.

Drew
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