rcu: Reduce cache-miss initialization latencies for large systems

Commit #0209f649 (rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout) set an upper
limit of 16 on the leaf-level fanout for the rcu_node tree.  This was
needed to reduce lock contention that was induced by the synchronization
of scheduling-clock interrupts, which was in turn needed to improve
energy efficiency for moderate-sized lightly loaded servers.

However, reducing the leaf-level fanout means that there are more
leaf-level rcu_node structures in the tree, which in turn means that
RCU's grace-period initialization incurs more cache misses.  This is
not a problem on moderate-sized servers with only a few tens of CPUs,
but becomes a major source of real-time latency spikes on systems with
many hundreds of CPUs.  In addition, the workloads running on these large
systems tend to be CPU-bound, which eliminates the energy-efficiency
advantages of synchronizing scheduling-clock interrupts.  Therefore,
these systems need maximal values for the rcu_node leaf-level fanout.

This commit addresses this problem by introducing a new kernel parameter
named RCU_FANOUT_LEAF that directly controls the leaf-level fanout.
This parameter defaults to 16 to handle the common case of a moderate
sized lightly loaded servers, but may be set higher on larger systems.

Reported-by: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Reported-by: Dimitri Sivanich <sivanich@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/rcutree.c b/kernel/rcutree.c
index 1050d6d3922c..780acf8e15e9 100644
--- a/kernel/rcutree.c
+++ b/kernel/rcutree.c
@@ -2418,7 +2418,7 @@ static void __init rcu_init_levelspread(struct rcu_state *rsp)
 
 	for (i = NUM_RCU_LVLS - 1; i > 0; i--)
 		rsp->levelspread[i] = CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT;
-	rsp->levelspread[0] = RCU_FANOUT_LEAF;
+	rsp->levelspread[0] = CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_LEAF;
 }
 #else /* #ifdef CONFIG_RCU_FANOUT_EXACT */
 static void __init rcu_init_levelspread(struct rcu_state *rsp)