Messages in this thread Patch in this message |  | | From | Calvin Owens <> | | Subject | [PATCH v2 2/2] perf: Don't throttle based on NMI watchdog events | | Date | Wed, 29 Apr 2026 10:36:11 -0700 |
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The throttling logic in perf_sample_event_took() assumes the NMI is running at the maximum allowed sample rate. While this makes sense most of the time, it wildly overestimates the runtime of the NMI for the perf hardware watchdog:
# bpftrace -e 'kprobe:perf_sample_event_took { \ printf("%s: cpu=%02d time_taken=%dns\n", \ strftime("%H:%M:%S.%f", nsecs), cpu(), arg0); }' 03:12:13.087003: cpu=00 time_taken=3190ns 03:12:13.486789: cpu=01 time_taken=2918ns 03:12:18.075288: cpu=03 time_taken=3308ns 03:12:19.797207: cpu=02 time_taken=2581ns 03:12:23.110317: cpu=00 time_taken=2823ns 03:12:23.510308: cpu=01 time_taken=2943ns 03:12:29.229348: cpu=03 time_taken=3669ns 03:12:31.656306: cpu=02 time_taken=3262ns
The NMI for the watchdog runs for 2-4us every ten seconds, but the math done in perf_sample_event_took() concludes it is running for 200-400ms every second!
When it is the only PMU event running, it can take minutes to hours of samples from the watchdog for the moving average to accumulate to something near the real mean, which causes the same little "litany" of sample rate throttles to happen every time Linux boots with the perf hardware watchdog enabled:
perf: interrupt took too long (2526 > 2500), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 79000 perf: interrupt took too long (3177 > 3157), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 62000 perf: interrupt took too long (3979 > 3971), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 50000 perf: interrupt took too long (4983 > 4973), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 40000
This serves no purpose: it doesn't actually affect the runtime of the watchdog NMI at all. It confuses users, because it suggests their machine is spinning its wheels in interrupts when it isn't.
Because the watchdog NMI is so infrequent, we can avoid throttling it by making the throttling a two-step process: load and update a timestamp whenever we think we need to throttle, and only actually proceed to throttle if the last time that happened was less than one second ago.
This is inelegant, but it avoids touching the hot path and preserves current throttling behavior for real PMU use, at the cost of delaying the throttling by a single NMI.
Signed-off-by: Calvin Owens <calvin@wbinvd.org> --- Changes in v2: * Sashiko spotted that nesting NMIs could cause throttling to be skipped incorrectly. But its suggestions were terrible, ignore them and use __this_cpu_cmpxchg() to solve the problem instead. * Sashiko notes that NMIs which last over one second firing on a period of greater than one second will also skip throttling: I don't believe that could ever actually happen, but this isn't a hot path, so I added a check that the current NMI took less than a second just to be sure.
kernel/events/core.c | 16 ++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+)
diff --git a/kernel/events/core.c b/kernel/events/core.c index 6d1f8bad7e1c..c2a33cb194ce 100644 --- a/kernel/events/core.c +++ b/kernel/events/core.c @@ -623,6 +623,7 @@ core_initcall(init_events_core_sysctls); */ #define NR_ACCUMULATED_SAMPLES 128 static DEFINE_PER_CPU(u64, running_sample_length); +static DEFINE_PER_CPU(u64, last_throttle_clock); static u64 __report_avg; static u64 __report_allowed; @@ -643,6 +644,8 @@ void perf_sample_event_took(u64 sample_len_ns) u64 max_len = READ_ONCE(perf_sample_allowed_ns); u64 running_len; u64 avg_len; + u64 last; + u64 now; u32 max; if (max_len == 0) @@ -663,6 +666,19 @@ void perf_sample_event_took(u64 sample_len_ns) if (avg_len <= max_len) return; + /* + * Very infrequent events like the perf counter hard watchdog + * can trigger spurious throttling: skip throttling if the prior + * NMI got here more than one second before this NMI began. But + * never skip throttling if NMIs are nesting, or if any NMI runs + * for longer than one second. + */ + now = local_clock(); + last = __this_cpu_read(last_throttle_clock); + if (__this_cpu_cmpxchg(last_throttle_clock, last, now) == last && + now - last > NSEC_PER_SEC && sample_len_ns < NSEC_PER_SEC) + return; + __report_avg = avg_len; __report_allowed = max_len; -- 2.47.3
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