Re: [PATCH] softirq: let ksoftirqd do its job

From: David Miller
Date: Fri Sep 02 2016 - 02:39:20 EST


From: Eric Dumazet <eric.dumazet@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2016 10:42:29 -0700

> From: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> A while back, Paolo and Hannes sent an RFC patch adding threaded-able
> napi poll loop support : (https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/620657/)
>
> The problem seems to be that softirqs are very aggressive and are often
> handled by the current process, even if we are under stress and that
> ksoftirqd was scheduled, so that innocent threads would have more chance
> to make progress.
>
> This patch makes sure that if ksoftirq is running, we let it
> perform the softirq work.
>
> Jonathan Corbet summarized the issue in https://lwn.net/Articles/687617/
>
> Tested:
>
> - NIC receiving traffic handled by CPU 0
> - UDP receiver running on CPU 0, using a single UDP socket.
> - Incoming flood of UDP packets targeting the UDP socket.
>
> Before the patch, the UDP receiver could almost never get cpu cycles and
> could only receive ~2,000 packets per second.
>
> After the patch, cpu cycles are split 50/50 between user application and
> ksoftirqd/0, and we can effectively read ~900,000 packets per second,
> a huge improvement in DOS situation. (Note that more packets are now
> dropped by the NIC itself, since the BH handlers get less cpu cycles to
> drain RX ring buffer)
>
> Since the load runs in well identified threads context, an admin can
> more easily tune process scheduling parameters if needed.
>
> Reported-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Reported-by: Hannes Frederic Sowa <hannes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@xxxxxxxxxx>

I'm just kind of assuming this won't go through my tree, but I can take
it if that's what everyone agrees to.