Bug 599295

Description of problem:

Large amount of CPU time is wasted to handle MSI interrupt. This degrades  performance considerably under high MSI interrupt load.

MSI-X cannot be a workaround of this issue because RHEL5.x supports only 256 interrupt vectors and using MSI-X runs out of interrupt vectors easily. In this case (no enough vectors for MSI-X), MSI will be used instead of MSI-X.


 Analysis of the problem
 -----------------------
 When a MSI interrupt is generated, the RHEL5.x kernel mask it at the
 beginning of interrupt handler (at the ack time) if this MSI
 interrupt is maskable. To mask the MSI interrupt, kernel writes to
 PCI configuration space with holding spin-lock. This wastes large
 amount of CPU time because:

 - PCI config access is very slow.
 - PCI config access is serialized (need spin-lock) among CPUs.

 Masking maskable MSI interrupt is required only when irq affinity is
 being changed, and the behavior of RHEL5.x (masking every maskable
 MSI interrupt) is redundant. This was already fixed in the upstream
 kernel by commit 277bc33bc2479707e88b0b2ae6fe56e8e4aabe81.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version Number:      RHEL5
 Release Number:                               4
 Architecture:                                 x86_64
 Kernel Version:                               2.6.18-164.9.1.el5
 Related Package Version:                      None
 Related Middleware / Application:             None

Drivers or hardware or architecture dependency:

 System with PCI adapter cards that support maskable MSI.
 This problem is not processor architecture specific.

The specifically benchmarked system is:

 Model:        PRIMEQUEST1800E
 CPU Info:     Xeon X7560 (2.27GHz/8core/24MB L3) * 8
 Memory Info:  512GB (DDR3-1066 8GB DIMM * 64)
 Hardware Component Information:
 - FC:    8GB FC (PCIe/single port) * 28
 - LAN:     On-board LAN (Intel igb 1000Mbps) * 4
 - Storage: 270 Logical Volumes
   * ETERNUS6000(8FC path, 24 RAID groups(RAID0)) * 4
   * ETERNUS3000(2FC path, 1 RAID group(RAID0), 6 RAID grpups (RAID5)) * 1

How reproducible:
  Every time

Actual Results:

 Performance is very much degraded when MSI is used, compared to
 MSI-X.

Expected results:

 Performance result using MSI is near to the performance result using
 MSI-X.

Additional info:

 No sosreport unfortunately. It is difficult to build the same
 environment where we did benchmark for getting sosreport because the
 environment was very large (around I/O configuration especially).

 About the proposal patch
 ------------------------
 As mentioned above, this issue was fixed in upstream kernel by the
 commit 277bc33bc2479707e88b0b2ae6fe56e8e4aabe81, which changes MSI
 logic to use irq_chip instead of using hw_interrupt_type. This
 change seems too large to be backported to RHEL5.x. So the proposal
 patch changes existing hw_interrupt_type for MSI to not mask
 maskable interrupt at the ack time.

The customers patch is attached.