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  • Marcelo Tosatti's avatar
    fs/buffer.c: disable per-CPU buffer_head cache for isolated CPUs · 8a237adf
    Marcelo Tosatti authored
    
    For certain types of applications (for example PLC software or
    RAN processing), upon occurrence of an event, it is necessary to
    complete a certain task in a maximum amount of time (deadline).
    
    One way to express this requirement is with a pair of numbers,
    deadline time and execution time, where:
    
            * deadline time: length of time between event and deadline.
            * execution time: length of time it takes for processing of event
                              to occur on a particular hardware platform
                              (uninterrupted).
    
    The particular values depend on use-case. For the case
    where the realtime application executes in a virtualized
    guest, an IPI which must be serviced in the host will cause
    the following sequence of events:
    
            1) VM-exit
            2) execution of IPI (and function call)
            3) VM-entry
    
    Which causes an excess of 50us latency as observed by cyclictest
    (this violates the latency requirement of vRAN application with 1ms TTI,
    for example).
    
    invalidate_bh_lrus calls an IPI on each CPU that has non empty
    per-CPU cache:
    
            on_each_cpu_cond(has_bh_in_lru, invalidate_bh_lru, NULL, 1);
    
    The performance when using the per-CPU LRU cache is as follows:
    
     42 ns per __find_get_block
     68 ns per __find_get_block_slow
    
    Given that the main use cases for latency sensitive applications
    do not involve block I/O (data necessary for program operation is
    locked in RAM), disable per-CPU buffer_head caches for isolated CPUs.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMarcelo Tosatti <mtosatti@redhat.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarFrederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
    Message-Id: <ZJtBrybavtb1x45V@tpad>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarChristian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
    8a237adf