Re: Potential Regression in futex Performance from v6.9 to v6.10-rc1 and v6.11-rc4

[David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com>]

On 04.09.24 12:05, Anders Roxell wrote:
> On Tue, 3 Sept 2024 at 14:37, David Hildenbrand <david@redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 03.09.24 14:21, Anders Roxell wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've noticed that the futex01-thread-* tests in will-it-scale-sys-threads
>>> are running about 2% slower on v6.10-rc1 compared to v6.9, and this
>>> slowdown continues with v6.11-rc4. I am focused on identifying any
>>> performance regressions greater than 2% that occur in automated
>>> testing on arm64 HW.
>>>
>>> Using git bisect, I traced the issue to commit
>>> f002882ca369 ("mm: merge folio_is_secretmem() and
>>> folio_fast_pin_allowed() into gup_fast_folio_allowed()").
>>
>> Thanks for analyzing the (slight) regression!
>>
>>>
>>> My tests were performed on m7g.large and m7g.metal instances:
>>>
>>> * The slowdown is consistent regardless of the number of threads;
>>>      futex1-threads-128 performs similarly to futex1-threads-2, indicating
>>>      there is no scalability issue, just a minor performance overhead.
>>> * The test doesn’t involve actual futex operations, just dummy wake/wait
>>>      on a variable that isn’t accessed by other threads, so the results might
>>>      not be very significant.
>>>
>>> Given that this seems to be a minor increase in code path length rather
>>> than a scalability issue, would this be considered a genuine regression?
>>
>> Likely not, I've seen these kinds of regressions (for example in my fork
>> micro-benchmarks) simply because the compiler slightly changes the code
>> layout, or suddenly decides to not inline a functions.
>>
>> Still it is rather unexpected, so let's find out what's happening.
>>
>> My first intuition would have been that the compiler now decides to not
>> inline gup_fast_folio_allowed() anymore, adding a function call.
>>
>> LLVM seems to inline it for me. GCC not.
>>
>> Would this return the original behavior for you?
> 
> David thank you for quick patch for me to try.
> 
> This patch helped the original regression on v6.10-rc1, but on current mainline
> v6.11-rc6 the patch does nothing and the performance is as expeced.

Just so I understand this correctly:

It fixed itself after v6.11-rc4, but v6.11-rc4 was fixed with my patch?

If that's the case, then it's really the compiler deciding whether to 
inline or not, and on v6.11-rc6 it decides to inline again.

-- 
Cheers,

David / dhildenb