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A mirror of the official Linux kernel repository just in case
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We have observed that on very large machines with newer CPUs, the static key/branch switching delay is on the order of milliseconds. This is due to the required broadcast IPIs, which simply does not scale well to hundreds of CPUs (cores). If done too frequently, this can adversely affect tail latencies of various workloads. One workaround is to increase the sample interval to several seconds, while decreasing sampled allocation coverage, but the problem still exists and could still increase tail latencies. As already noted in the Kconfig help text, there are trade-offs: at lower sample intervals the dynamic branch results in better performance; however, at very large sample intervals, the static keys mode can result in better performance -- careful benchmarking is recommended. Our initial benchmarking showed that with large enough sample intervals and workloads stressing the allocator, the static keys mode was slightly better. Evaluating and observing the possible system-wide side-effects of the static-key-switching induced broadcast IPIs, however, was a blind spot (in particular on large machines with 100s of cores). Therefore, a major downside of the static keys mode is, unfortunately, that it is hard to predict performance on new system architectures and topologies, but also making conclusions about performance of new workloads based on a limited set of benchmarks. Most distributions will simply select the defaults, while targeting a large variety of different workloads and system architectures. As such, the better default is CONFIG_KFENCE_STATIC_KEYS=n, and re-enabling it is only recommended after careful evaluation. For reference, on x86-64 the condition in kfence_alloc() generates exactly 2 instructions in the kmem_cache_alloc() fast-path: | ... | cmpl $0x0,0x1a8021c(%rip) # ffffffff82d560d0 <kfence_allocation_gate> | je ffffffff812d6003 <kmem_cache_alloc+0x243> | ... which, given kfence_allocation_gate is infrequently modified, should be well predicted by most CPUs. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20211019102524.2807208-2-elver@google.com Signed-off-by: Marco Elver <elver@google.com> Cc: Alexander Potapenko <glider@google.com> Cc: Dmitry Vyukov <dvyukov@google.com> Cc: Jann Horn <jannh@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> |
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| Documentation | ||
| drivers | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| LICENSES | ||
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| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
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| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.