Updating a BPF_MAP_TYPE_HASH_OF_MAPS or BPF_MAP_TYPE_ARRAY_OF_MAPS via
bpf_map_update_elem() is very expensive.
In one of our workloads, we're inserting ~1400 maps of type
BPF_MAP_TYPE_ARRAY into a BPF_MAP_TYPE_ARRAY_OF_MAPS. This takes ~21
seconds on a single thread, with an average of ~15ms per call:
Function Name: map_update_elem
Number of calls: 1369
Total time: 21s 182ms 966µs
Maximum: 47ms 937µs
Average: 15ms 473µs
Minimum: 7µs
Profiling shows that nearly all of this time is going to synchronize_rcu(),
via maybe_wait_bpf_programs() in map_update_elem().
The call to synchronize_rcu() is done to ensure that after
bpf_map_update_elem() returns, no BPF programs are still looking at the old
value of the map, per commit 1ae80cf319 ("bpf: wait for running BPF
programs when updating map-in-map").
As discussed on the bpf mailing list, replace synchronize_rcu() with
synchronize_rcu_expedited(). This is 175x faster: it now takes an average
of 88 microseconds per call, for a total of 127 milliseconds in the same
benchmark:
Function Name: map_update_elem
Number of calls: 1439
Total time: 127ms 626µs
Maximum: 445µs
Average: 88µs
Minimum: 10µs
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/bpf/CAH6OuBR=w2kybK6u7aH_35B=Bo1PCukeMZefR=7V4Z2tJNK--Q@mail.gmail.com/
Signed-off-by: Ritesh Oedayrajsingh Varma <ritesh@superluminal.eu>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20251128000422.20462-1-ritesh@superluminal.eu
Signed-off-by: Alexei Starovoitov <ast@kernel.org>
ff34657aa7