recvfrom/recvmsg performance and CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY

From: David Laight
Date: Fri Dec 06 2019 - 08:39:39 EST


Some tests I've done seem to show that recvmsg() is much slower that recvfrom()
even though most of what they do is the same.
One thought is that the difference is all the extra copy_from_user() needed by
recvmsg. CONFIG_HARDENED_USERCOPY can add a significant cost.

I've built rebuilt my 5.4-rc7 kernel with all the copy_to/from_user() in net/socket.c
replaced with the '_' prefixed versions (that don't call check_object()).
And also changed rw_copy_check_uvector() in fs/read_write.c.

Schedviz then showed the time spent by the application thread that calls
recvmsg() (about) 225 times being reduced from 0.9ms to 0.75ms.

I've now instrumented the actual recv calls. It show some differences,
but now enough to explain the 20% difference above.
(This is all made more difficult because my Ivy Bridge i7-3770 refuses
to run at a fixed frequency.)

Anyway using PERF_COUNT_HW_CPU_CYCLES I've got the following
histograms for the number of cycles in each recv call.
There are about the same number (2.8M) in each column over
an elapsed time of 20 seconds.
There are 450 active UDP sockets, each receives 1 message every 20ms.
Every 10ms a RT thread that is pinned to a cpu reads all the pending messages.
This is a 4 core hyperthreading (8 cpu) system.
During these tests 5 other threads are also busy.
There are no sends (on those sockets).

| recvfrom | recvmsg
cycles | unhard | hard | unhard | hard
-----------------------------------------------------
1472: 29 1 0 0
1600: 8980 4887 3 0
1728: 112540 159518 5393 2895
1856: 174555 270148 119054 111230
1984: 126007 168383 152310 195288
2112: 80249 87045 118941 168801
2240: 61570 54790 81847 110561
2368: 95088 61796 57496 71732
2496: 193633 155870 54020 54801
2624: 274997 284921 102465 74626
2752: 276661 295715 160492 119498
2880: 248751 264174 206327 186028
3008: 207532 213067 230704 229232
3136: 167976 164804 226493 238555
3264: 133708 124857 202639 220574
3392: 107859 95696 172949 189475
3520: 88599 75943 141056 153524
3648: 74290 61586 115873 120994
3776: 62253 50891 96061 95040
3904: 52213 42482 81113 76577
4032: 42920 34632 69077 63131
4160: 35472 28327 60074 53631
4288: 28787 22603 51345 46620
4416: 24072 18496 44006 40325
4544: 20107 14886 37185 34516
4672: 16759 12206 31408 29031
4800: 14195 9991 26843 24396
4928: 12356 8167 22775 20165
5056: 10387 6931 19404 16591
5184: 9284 5916 16817 13743
5312: 7994 5116 14737 11452
5440: 7152 4495 12592 9607
5568: 6300 3969 11117 8592
5696: 5445 3421 9988 7237
5824: 4683 2829 8839 6368
5952: 3959 2643 7652 5652
6080: 3454 2377 6442 4814
6208: 3041 2219 5735 4170
6336: 2840 2060 5059 3615
6464: 2428 1975 4433 3201
6592: 2109 1794 4078 2823
6720: 1871 1382 3549 2558
6848: 1706 1262 3110 2328
6976: 1567 1001 2733 1991
7104: 1436 873 2436 1819
7232: 1417 860 2102 1652
7360: 1414 741 1823 1429
7488: 1372 814 1663 1239
7616: 1201 896 1430 1152
7744: 1275 1008 1364 1049
7872: 1382 1120 1367 925
8000: 1316 1282 1253 815
8128: 1264 1266 1313 792
8256+: 19252 19450 34703 30228
----------------------------------------------------
Total: 2847707 2863582 2853688 2877088

This does show a few interesting things:
1) The 'hardened' kernel is slower, especially for recvmsg.
2) The difference for recvfrom isn't enough for the 20% reduction I saw.
3) There are two peaks at the top a 'not insubstantial' number are a lot
faster than the main peak.
4) There is second peak way down at 8000 cycles.
This is repeatable.

Any idea what is actually going on??

David

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