6.12-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know.
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From: Herton R. Krzesinski herton@redhat.com
[ Upstream commit b5322b6ec06a6c58650f52abcd2492000396363b ]
History of the performance regression: ======================================
Since the following series of user copy updates were merged upstream ~2 years ago via:
a5624566431d ("Merge branch 'x86-rep-insns': x86 user copy clarifications")
.. copy_user_generic() on x86_64 stopped doing alignment of the writes to the destination to a 8 byte boundary for the non FSRM case.
Previously, this was done through the ALIGN_DESTINATION macro that was used in the now removed copy_user_generic_unrolled function.
Turns out this change causes some loss of performance/throughput on some use cases and specific CPU/platforms without FSRM and ERMS.
Lately I got two reports of performance/throughput issues after a RHEL 9 kernel pulled the same upstream series with updates to user copy functions. Both reports consisted of running specific networking/TCP related testing using iperf3.
Partial upstream fix ====================
The first report was related to a Linux Bridge testing using VMs on a specific machine with an AMD CPU (EPYC 7402), and after a brief investigation it turned out that the later change via:
ca96b162bfd2 ("x86: bring back rep movsq for user access on CPUs without ERMS")
... helped/fixed the performance issue.
However, after the later commit/fix was applied, then I got another regression reported in a multistream TCP test on a 100Gbit mlx5 nic, also running on an AMD based platform (AMD EPYC 7302 CPU), again that was using iperf3 to run the test. That regression was after applying the later fix/commit, but only this didn't help in telling the whole history.
Testing performed to pinpoint residual regression =================================================
So I narrowed down the second regression use case, but running it without traffic through a NIC, on localhost, in trying to narrow down CPU usage and not being limited by other factor like network bandwidth. I used another system also with an AMD CPU (AMD EPYC 7742). Basically, I run iperf3 in server and client mode in the same system, for example:
- Start the server binding it to CPU core/thread 19: $ taskset -c 19 iperf3 -D -s -B 127.0.0.1 -p 12000
- Start the client always binding/running on CPU core/thread 17, using perf to get statistics: $ perf stat -o stat.txt taskset -c 17 iperf3 -c 127.0.0.1 -b 0/1000 -V \ -n 50G --repeating-payload -l 16384 -p 12000 --cport 12001 2>&1 \ > stat-19.txt
For the client, always running/pinned to CPU 17. But for the iperf3 in server mode, I did test runs using CPUs 19, 21, 23 or not pinned to any specific CPU. So it basically consisted with four runs of the same commands, just changing the CPU which the server is pinned, or without pinning by removing the taskset call before the server command. The CPUs were chosen based on NUMA node they were on, this is the relevant output of lscpu on the system:
$ lscpu ... Model name: AMD EPYC 7742 64-Core Processor ... Caches (sum of all): L1d: 2 MiB (64 instances) L1i: 2 MiB (64 instances) L2: 32 MiB (64 instances) L3: 256 MiB (16 instances) NUMA: NUMA node(s): 4 NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0,1,8,9,16,17,24,25,32,33,40,41,48,49,56,57,64,65,72,73,80,81,88,89,96,97,104,105,112,113,120,121 NUMA node1 CPU(s): 2,3,10,11,18,19,26,27,34,35,42,43,50,51,58,59,66,67,74,75,82,83,90,91,98,99,106,107,114,115,122,123 NUMA node2 CPU(s): 4,5,12,13,20,21,28,29,36,37,44,45,52,53,60,61,68,69,76,77,84,85,92,93,100,101,108,109,116,117,124,125 NUMA node3 CPU(s): 6,7,14,15,22,23,30,31,38,39,46,47,54,55,62,63,70,71,78,79,86,87,94,95,102,103,110,111,118,119,126,127 ...
So for the server run, when picking a CPU, I chose CPUs to be not on the same node. The reason is with that I was able to get/measure relevant performance differences when changing the alignment of the writes to the destination in copy_user_generic.
Testing shows up to +81% performance improvement under iperf3 =============================================================
Here's a summary of the iperf3 runs:
# Vanilla upstream alignment:
CPU RATE SYS TIME sender-receiver Server bind 19: 13.0Gbits/sec 28.371851000 33.233499566 86.9%-70.8% Server bind 21: 12.9Gbits/sec 28.283381000 33.586486621 85.8%-69.9% Server bind 23: 11.1Gbits/sec 33.660190000 39.012243176 87.7%-64.5% Server bind none: 18.9Gbits/sec 19.215339000 22.875117865 86.0%-80.5%
# With the attached patch (aligning writes in non ERMS/FSRM case):
CPU RATE SYS TIME sender-receiver Server bind 19: 20.8Gbits/sec 14.897284000 20.811101382 75.7%-89.0% Server bind 21: 20.4Gbits/sec 15.205055000 21.263165909 75.4%-89.7% Server bind 23: 20.2Gbits/sec 15.433801000 21.456175000 75.5%-89.8% Server bind none: 26.1Gbits/sec 12.534022000 16.632447315 79.8%-89.6%
So I consistently got better results when aligning the write. The results above were run on 6.14.0-rc6/rc7 based kernels. The sys is sys time and then the total time to run/transfer 50G of data. The last field is the CPU usage of sender/receiver iperf3 process. It's also worth to note that each pair of iperf3 runs may get slightly different results on each run, but I always got consistent higher results with the write alignment for this specific test of running the processes on CPUs in different NUMA nodes.
Linus Torvalds helped/provided this version of the patch. Initially I proposed a version which aligned writes for all cases in rep_movs_alternative, however it used two extra registers and thus Linus provided an enhanced version that only aligns the write on the large_movsq case, which is sufficient since the problem happens only on those AMD CPUs like ones mentioned above without ERMS/FSRM, and also doesn't require using extra registers. Also, I validated that aligning only on large_movsq case is really enough for getting the performance back.
I also tested this patch on an old Intel based non-ERMS/FRMS system (with Xeon E5-2667 - Sandy Bridge based) and didn't get any problems: no performance enhancement but also no regression either, using the same iperf3 based benchmark. Also newer Intel processors after Sandy Bridge usually have ERMS and should not be affected by this change.
[ mingo: Updated the changelog. ]
Fixes: ca96b162bfd2 ("x86: bring back rep movsq for user access on CPUs without ERMS") Fixes: 034ff37d3407 ("x86: rewrite '__copy_user_nocache' function") Reported-by: Ondrej Lichtner olichtne@redhat.com Co-developed-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds torvalds@linux-foundation.org Signed-off-by: Herton R. Krzesinski herton@redhat.com Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar mingo@kernel.org Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250320142213.2623518-1-herton@redhat.com Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin sashal@kernel.org --- arch/x86/lib/copy_user_64.S | 18 ++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 18 insertions(+)
diff --git a/arch/x86/lib/copy_user_64.S b/arch/x86/lib/copy_user_64.S index fc9fb5d061744..b8f74d80f35c6 100644 --- a/arch/x86/lib/copy_user_64.S +++ b/arch/x86/lib/copy_user_64.S @@ -74,6 +74,24 @@ SYM_FUNC_START(rep_movs_alternative) _ASM_EXTABLE_UA( 0b, 1b)
.Llarge_movsq: + /* Do the first possibly unaligned word */ +0: movq (%rsi),%rax +1: movq %rax,(%rdi) + + _ASM_EXTABLE_UA( 0b, .Lcopy_user_tail) + _ASM_EXTABLE_UA( 1b, .Lcopy_user_tail) + + /* What would be the offset to the aligned destination? */ + leaq 8(%rdi),%rax + andq $-8,%rax + subq %rdi,%rax + + /* .. and update pointers and count to match */ + addq %rax,%rdi + addq %rax,%rsi + subq %rax,%rcx + + /* make %rcx contain the number of words, %rax the remainder */ movq %rcx,%rax shrq $3,%rcx andl $7,%eax