I had forgotten just how sensitive hackbench is to extra pipe wakeups,
and commit 3a34b13a88 ("pipe: make pipe writes always wake up
readers") ended up causing a quite noticeable regression on larger
machines.
Now, hackbench isn't necessarily a hugely meaningful benchmark, and it's
not clear that this matters in real life all that much, but as Mel
points out, it's used often enough when comparing kernels and so the
performance regression shows up like a sore thumb.
It's easy enough to fix at least for the common cases where pipes are
used purely for data transfer, and you never have any exciting poll
usage at all. So set a special 'poll_usage' flag when there is polling
activity, and make the ugly "EPOLLET has crazy legacy expectations"
semantics explicit to only that case.
I would love to limit it to just the broken EPOLLET case, but the pipe
code can't see the difference between epoll and regular select/poll, so
any non-read/write waiting will trigger the extra wakeup behavior. That
is sufficient for at least the hackbench case.
Apart from making the odd extra wakeup cases more explicitly about
EPOLLET, this also makes the extra wakeup be at the _end_ of the pipe
write, not at the first write chunk. That is actually much saner
semantics (as much as you can call any of the legacy edge-triggered
expectations for EPOLLET "sane") since it means that you know the wakeup
will happen once the write is done, rather than possibly in the middle
of one.
[ For stable people: I'm putting a "Fixes" tag on this, but I leave it
up to you to decide whether you actually want to backport it or not.
It likely has no impact outside of synthetic benchmarks - Linus ]
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20210802024945.GA8372@xsang-OptiPlex-9020/
Fixes: 3a34b13a88 ("pipe: make pipe writes always wake up readers")
Reported-by: kernel test robot <oliver.sang@intel.com>
Tested-by: Sandeep Patil <sspatil@android.com>
Tested-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
3b844826b6