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    rcu: Parallelize and economize NOCB kthread wakeups · fbce7497
    Paul E. McKenney authored
    
    
    An 80-CPU system with a context-switch-heavy workload can require so
    many NOCB kthread wakeups that the RCU grace-period kthreads spend several
    tens of percent of a CPU just awakening things.  This clearly will not
    scale well: If you add enough CPUs, the RCU grace-period kthreads would
    get behind, increasing grace-period latency.
    
    To avoid this problem, this commit divides the NOCB kthreads into leaders
    and followers, where the grace-period kthreads awaken the leaders each of
    whom in turn awakens its followers.  By default, the number of groups of
    kthreads is the square root of the number of CPUs, but this default may
    be overridden using the rcutree.rcu_nocb_leader_stride boot parameter.
    This reduces the number of wakeups done per grace period by the RCU
    grace-period kthread by the square root of the number of CPUs, but of
    course by shifting those wakeups to the leaders.  In addition, because
    the leaders do grace periods on behalf of their respective followers,
    the number of wakeups of the followers decreases by up to a factor of two.
    Instead of being awakened once when new callbacks arrive and again
    at the end of the grace period, the followers are awakened only at
    the end of the grace period.
    
    For a numerical example, in a 4096-CPU system, the grace-period kthread
    would awaken 64 leaders, each of which would awaken its 63 followers
    at the end of the grace period.  This compares favorably with the 79
    wakeups for the grace-period kthread on an 80-CPU system.
    
    Reported-by: default avatarRik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
    fbce7497