softirq: reduce latencies

Date	Thu, 03 Jan 2013 23:49:40 -0800

In various network workloads, __do_softirq() latencies can be up
to 20 ms if HZ=1000, and 200 ms if HZ=100.

This is because we iterate 10 times in the softirq dispatcher,
and some actions can consume a lot of cycles.

This patch changes the fallback to ksoftirqd condition to :

- A time limit of 2 ms.
- need_resched() being set on current task

When one of this condition is met, we wakeup ksoftirqd for further
softirq processing if we still have pending softirqs.

Using need_resched() as the only condition can trigger RCU stalls,
as we can keep BH disabled for too long.

I ran several benchmarks and got no significant difference in
throughput, but a very significant reduction of latencies (one order
of magnitude) :

In following bench, 200 antagonist "netperf -t TCP_RR" are started in
background, using all available cpus.

Then we start one "netperf -t TCP_RR", bound to the cpu handling the NIC
IRQ (hard+soft)

Before patch :

RT_LATENCY,MIN_LATENCY,MAX_LATENCY,P50_LATENCY,P90_LATENCY,P99_LATENCY,MEAN_LATENCY,STDDEV_LATENCY
MIGRATED TCP REQUEST/RESPONSE TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET
to 7.7.7.84 () port 0 AF_INET : first burst 0 : cpu bind
RT_LATENCY=550110.424
MIN_LATENCY=146858
MAX_LATENCY=997109
P50_LATENCY=305000
P90_LATENCY=550000
P99_LATENCY=710000
MEAN_LATENCY=376989.12
STDDEV_LATENCY=184046.92
After patch :

RT_LATENCY,MIN_LATENCY,MAX_LATENCY,P50_LATENCY,P90_LATENCY,P99_LATENCY,MEAN_LATENCY,STDDEV_LATENCY
MIGRATED TCP REQUEST/RESPONSE TEST from 0.0.0.0 (0.0.0.0) port 0 AF_INET
to 7.7.7.84 () port 0 AF_INET : first burst 0 : cpu bind
RT_LATENCY=40545.492
MIN_LATENCY=9834
MAX_LATENCY=78366
P50_LATENCY=33583
P90_LATENCY=59000
P99_LATENCY=69000
MEAN_LATENCY=38364.67
STDDEV_LATENCY=12865.26

Signed-off-by: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Tom Herbert <therbert@google.com>
Cc: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>
fs: vfat: reduce the worst case latencies

When a block partition is mounted with FAT file system
and MS_DIRSYNC option is used, some file system operations
like create, rename shall sleep in caller's context until
all the metadata have been committed to the non-volatile memory.
Since this operation is blocking call for user context,
the WRITE_SYNC option must be used instead of WRITE
(async operation) which incur inherent latencies while
flushing the meta-data corresponding to directory entries

Change-Id: I41c514889873a39d564271db0a421e6c66e5ae33
Signed-off-by: xiaogang <xiaogang@codeaurora.org>
jiffies conversions: Use compile time constants when possible

Date	Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:15:43 -0800

Do the multiplications and divisions at compile time
instead of runtime when the converted value is a constant.

Make the calculation functions static __always_inline to jiffies.h.

Add #defines with __builtin_constant_p to test and use the
static inline or the runtime functions as appropriate.

Prefix the old exported symbols/functions with __
msm: cpufreq: Only apply driver limits for scaling_min/max_freq writes

When new values are written to scaling_min/max_freq sysfs files, the
current code applies all the limits imposed by various ADJUST and
INCOMPATIBLE notifiers handlers before storing them.

When the ADJUST and/or INCOMPATIBLE notifiers change their limits
frequently, this behavior makes it almost impossible for a
user/userspace process to store the scaling_min/max_freq limits
that go beyond the instantaneous limits imposed by the notifiers.
Since these sysfs nodes are typically meant to set limits that need
to be enforced for the foreseeable future, this is not a very user
friendly behavior.

So, change the behavior to only apply limits that are enforced by
the cpufreq driver. Typically, these are just the absolute limits
of the HW and don't change very often.

Change-Id: I1ccfaa2d1ee4ea595f882485d359dbdb407a0176
Signed-off-by: Deepak Katragadda <dkatraga@codeaurora.org>
writeback: Fix occasional slow sync(1)

In case when system contains no dirty pages, wakeup_flusher_threads()
will submit WB_SYNC_NONE writeback for 0 pages so wb_writeback() exits
immediately without doing anything. Thus sync(1) will write all the
dirty inodes from a WB_SYNC_ALL writeback pass which is slow.

Fix the problem by using get_nr_dirty_pages() in
wakeup_flusher_threads() instead of calculating number of dirty pages
manually. That function also takes number of dirty inodes into account.

CC: stable@vger.kernel.org
Reported-by: Paul Taysom <taysom@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Cristoforo Cataldo <cristoforo.cataldo@gmail.com>
fix another compile warning