x86/sgx: Reduce delay and interference of enclave release
commit 8795359e ("x86/sgx: Silence softlockup detection when releasing large enclaves") introduced a cond_resched() during enclave release where the EREMOVE instruction is applied to every 4k enclave page. Giving other tasks an opportunity to run while tearing down a large enclave placates the soft lockup detector but Iqbal found that the fix causes a 25% performance degradation of a workload run using Gramine. Gramine maintains a 1:1 mapping between processes and SGX enclaves. That means if a workload in an enclave creates a subprocess then Gramine creates a duplicate enclave for that subprocess to run in. The consequence is that the release of the enclave used to run the subprocess can impact the performance of the workload that is run in the original enclave, especially in large enclaves when SGX2 is not in use. The workload run by Iqbal behaves as follows: Create enclave (enclave "A") /* Initialize workload in enclave "A" */ Create enclave (enclave "B") /* Run subprocess in enclave "B" and send result to enclave "A" */ Release enclave (enclave "B") /* Run workload in enclave "A" */ Release enclave (enclave "A") The performance impact of releasing enclave "B" in the above scenario is amplified when there is a lot of SGX memory and the enclave size matches the SGX memory. When there is 128GB SGX memory and an enclave size of 128GB, from the time enclave "B" starts the 128GB SGX memory is oversubscribed with a combined demand for 256GB from the two enclaves. Before commit 8795359e ("x86/sgx: Silence softlockup detection when releasing large enclaves") enclave release was done in a tight loop without giving other tasks a chance to run. Even though the system experienced soft lockups the workload (run in enclave "A") obtained good performance numbers because when the workload started running there was no interference. Commit 8795359e ("x86/sgx: Silence softlockup detection when releasing large enclaves") gave other tasks opportunity to run while an enclave is released. The impact of this in this scenario is that while enclave "B" is released and needing to access each page that belongs to it in order to run the SGX EREMOVE instruction on it, enclave "A" is attempting to run the workload needing to access the enclave pages that belong to it. This causes a lot of swapping due to the demand for the oversubscribed SGX memory. Longer latencies are experienced by the workload in enclave "A" while enclave "B" is released. Improve the performance of enclave release while still avoiding the soft lockup detector with two enhancements: - Only call cond_resched() after XA_CHECK_SCHED iterations. - Use the xarray advanced API to keep the xarray locked for XA_CHECK_SCHED iterations instead of locking and unlocking at every iteration. This batching solution is copied from sgx_encl_may_map() that also iterates through all enclave pages using this technique. With this enhancement the workload experiences a 5% performance degradation when compared to a kernel without commit 8795359e ("x86/sgx: Silence softlockup detection when releasing large enclaves"), an improvement to the reported 25% degradation, while still placating the soft lockup detector. Scenarios with poor performance are still possible even with these enhancements. For example, short workloads creating sub processes while running in large enclaves. Further performance improvements are pursued in user space through avoiding to create duplicate enclaves for certain sub processes, and using SGX2 that will do lazy allocation of pages as needed so enclaves created for sub processes start quickly and release quickly. Fixes: 8795359e ("x86/sgx: Silence softlockup detection when releasing large enclaves") Reported-by: Md Iqbal Hossain <md.iqbal.hossain@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Reinette Chatre <reinette.chatre@intel.com> Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@linux.intel.com> Tested-by: Md Iqbal Hossain <md.iqbal.hossain@intel.com> Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/00efa80dd9e35dc85753e1c5edb0344ac07bb1f0.1667236485.git.reinette.chatre%40intel.com
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment