[PATCH] cpuidle: Select polling interval based on a c-state with a longer target residency

[Mel Gorman]

It was noted that a few workloads that idle rapidly regressed when commit
36fcb4292473 ("cpuidle: use first valid target residency as poll time")
was merged. The workloads in question were heavy communicators that idle
rapidly and were impacted by the c-state exit latency as the active CPUs
were not polling at the time of wakeup. As they were not particularly
realistic workloads, it was not considered to be a major problem.

Unfortunately, a bug was reported for a real workload in a production
environment that relied on large numbers of threads operating in a worker
pool pattern. These threads would idle for periods of time longer than the
C1 target residency and so incurred the c-state exit latency penalty. The
application is very sensitive to wakeup latency and indirectly relying
on behaviour prior to commit on a37b969a61c1 ("cpuidle: poll_state: Add
time limit to poll_idle()") to poll for long enough to avoid the exit
latency cost.

The target residency of C1 is typically very short. On some x86 machines,
it can be as low as 2 microseconds. In poll_idle(), the clock is checked
every POLL_IDLE_RELAX_COUNT interations of cpu_relax() and even one
iteration of that loop can be over 1 microsecond so the polling interval is
very close to the granularity of what poll_idle() can detect. Furthermore,
a basic ping pong workload like perf bench pipe has a longer round-trip
time than the 2 microseconds meaning that the CPU will almost certainly
not be polling when the ping-pong completes.

This patch selects a polling interval based on an enabled c-state that
has an target residency longer than 10usec. If there is no enabled-cstate
then polling will be up to a TICK_NSEC/16 similar to what it was up until
kernel 4.20.

As an example, consider a CPU with the following c-state information from
an Intel CPU;

	residency	exit_latency
C1	2		2
C1E	20		10
C3	100		33
C6	400		133

The polling interval selected is 20usec. If booted with
intel_idle.max_cstate=1 then the polling interval is 250usec as the deeper
c-states were not available.

On an AMD EPYC machine, the c-state information is more limited and looks
like

	residency	exit_latency
C1	2		1
C2	800		400

The polling interval selected is 250usec. While C2 was considered, the
polling interval was clamped by CPUIDLE_POLL_MAX.

Note that it is not expected that polling will be a universal win. As
well as potentially trading power for performance, the performance is not
guaranteed if the extra polling prevented a turbo state being reached. The
patch allows the polling interval to be tuned in case a corner-case is
found and if a bug is filed, the tuning may advise how CPUIDLE_POLL_MIN
should be adjusted (e.g. optional overrides per architecture) or if a
different balance point than residency-exit_latency should be used.

tbench4
			     vanilla		    polling
Hmean     1        497.89 (   0.00%)      543.15 *   9.09%*
Hmean     2        975.88 (   0.00%)     1059.73 *   8.59%*
Hmean     4       1953.97 (   0.00%)     2081.37 *   6.52%*
Hmean     8       3645.76 (   0.00%)     4052.95 *  11.17%*
Hmean     16      6882.21 (   0.00%)     6995.93 *   1.65%*
Hmean     32     10752.20 (   0.00%)    10731.53 *  -0.19%*
Hmean     64     12875.08 (   0.00%)    12478.13 *  -3.08%*
Hmean     128    21500.54 (   0.00%)    21098.60 *  -1.87%*
Hmean     256    21253.70 (   0.00%)    21027.18 *  -1.07%*
Hmean     320    20813.50 (   0.00%)    20580.64 *  -1.12%*

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---
 Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt | 18 +++++++++
 drivers/cpuidle/cpuidle.c                       | 49 ++++++++++++++++++++++++-
 2 files changed, 65 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
index 526d65d8573a..5b8545022564 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -719,6 +719,24 @@
 			policy to use. This governor must be registered in the
 			kernel before the cpufreq driver probes.
 
+	cpuidle.poll=
+			[CPU_IDLE]
+			Format: <int>
+			Set the time in microseconds a CPU should poll in
+			cpuidle for a new task before entering a sleep
+			state. The default is determined by either the
+			tick or the enabled c-state latencies. Tuning is
+			not generally recommended but it may be needed
+			for workloads that are both latency-sensitive
+			and idling rapidly for short durations. Limiting
+			c-states can be insufficient if the polling
+			time is still too short, the application has no
+			knowledge of /dev/cpu_dma_latency, there are
+			multiple applications or the environment does
+			not allow the installation of a userspace tool
+			that controls cpu_dma_latency. This value may
+			be ignored by the idle governor (e.g. haltpoll).
+
 	cpu_init_udelay=N
 			[X86] Delay for N microsec between assert and de-assert
 			of APIC INIT to start processors.  This delay occurs
diff --git a/drivers/cpuidle/cpuidle.c b/drivers/cpuidle/cpuidle.c
index 83af15f77f66..3be208e9043a 100644
--- a/drivers/cpuidle/cpuidle.c
+++ b/drivers/cpuidle/cpuidle.c
@@ -368,6 +368,26 @@ void cpuidle_reflect(struct cpuidle_device *dev, int index)
 		cpuidle_curr_governor->reflect(dev, index);
 }
 
+static struct kernel_param_ops poll_param_ops = {
+	.set =          param_set_ulong,
+	.get =          param_get_ulong,
+};
+
+/*
+ * Min polling interval of 10usec is a guess. It is assuming that
+ * for most users, the time for a single ping-pong workload like
+ * perf bench pipe would generally complete within 10usec but
+ * this is hardware dependant. Actual time can be estimated with
+ *
+ * perf bench sched pipe -l 10000
+ *
+ * Run multiple times to avoid cpufreq effects.
+ */
+#define CPUIDLE_POLL_MIN 10000
+#define CPUIDLE_POLL_MAX (TICK_NSEC / 16)
+
+static unsigned long __read_mostly param_poll;
+
 /**
  * cpuidle_poll_time - return amount of time to poll for,
  * governors can override dev->poll_limit_ns if necessary
@@ -382,20 +402,44 @@ u64 cpuidle_poll_time(struct cpuidle_driver *drv,
 	int i;
 	u64 limit_ns;
 
+	BUILD_BUG_ON(CPUIDLE_POLL_MIN > CPUIDLE_POLL_MAX);
+
 	if (dev->poll_limit_ns)
 		return dev->poll_limit_ns;
 
-	limit_ns = TICK_NSEC;
+	/* Use module parameter if specified */
+	if (param_poll) {
+		param_poll *= NSEC_PER_USEC;
+		param_poll = clamp_t(unsigned long, param_poll * NSEC_PER_USEC,
+					CPUIDLE_POLL_MIN, CPUIDLE_POLL_MAX);
+		limit_ns = param_poll;
+		goto out;
+	}
+
+	limit_ns = CPUIDLE_POLL_MAX;
 	for (i = 1; i < drv->state_count; i++) {
+		u64 state_limit;
+
 		if (dev->states_usage[i].disable)
 			continue;
 
-		limit_ns = drv->states[i].target_residency_ns;
+		state_limit = drv->states[i].target_residency_ns;
+		if (state_limit < CPUIDLE_POLL_MIN)
+			continue;
+
+		limit_ns = min_t(u64, state_limit, CPUIDLE_POLL_MAX);
 		break;
 	}
 
+out:
 	dev->poll_limit_ns = limit_ns;
 
+	/*
+	 * Polling parameter reported as usec to match the values reported
+	 * for c-cstate exit latencies in sysfs.
+	 */
+	param_poll = div64_ul(dev->poll_limit_ns, NSEC_PER_USEC);
+
 	return dev->poll_limit_ns;
 }
 
@@ -755,4 +799,5 @@ static int __init cpuidle_init(void)
 
 module_param(off, int, 0444);
 module_param_string(governor, param_governor, CPUIDLE_NAME_LEN, 0444);
+module_param_cb(poll, &poll_param_ops, &param_poll, 0444);
 core_initcall(cpuidle_init);