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Ticket spinlocks have absolutely ghastly worst-case performance
characteristics in a virtual environment. If there is any contention
for physical CPUs (ie, there are more runnable vcpus than cpus), then
ticket locks can cause the system to end up spending 90+% of its time
spinning.
The problem is that (v)cpus waiting on a ticket spinlock will be
granted access to the lock in strict order they got their tickets. If
the hypervisor scheduler doesn't give the vcpus time in that order,
they will burn timeslices waiting for the scheduler to give the right
vcpu some time. In the worst case it could take O(n^2) vcpu scheduler
timeslices for everyone waiting on the lock to get it, not counting
new cpus trying to take the lock while the log-jam is sorted out.
These hooks allow a paravirt backend to replace the spinlock
implementation.
At the very least, this could revert the implementation back to the
old lock algorithm, which allows the next scheduled vcpu to take the
lock, and has basically fairly good performance.
It also allows the spinlocks to take advantages of the hypervisor
features to make locks more efficient (spin and block, for example).
The cost to native execution is an extra direct call when using a
spinlock function. There's no overhead if CONFIG_PARAVIRT is turned
off.
The lock structure is fixed at a single "unsigned int", initialized to
zero, but the spinlock implementation can use it as it wishes.
Thanks to Thomas Friebel's Xen Summit talk "Preventing Guests from
Spinning Around" for pointing out this problem.
Signed-off-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy.fitzhardinge@citrix.com>
Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Petr Tesarik <ptesarik@suse.cz>
Cc: Virtualization <virtualization@lists.linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Xen devel <xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
Cc: Thomas Friebel <thomas.friebel@amd.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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Introduce ticket lock spinlocks for x86 which are FIFO. The implementation
is described in the comments. The straight-line lock/unlock instruction
sequence is slightly slower than the dec based locks on modern x86 CPUs,
however the difference is quite small on Core2 and Opteron when working out of
cache, and becomes almost insignificant even on P4 when the lock misses cache.
trylock is more significantly slower, but they are relatively rare.
On an 8 core (2 socket) Opteron, spinlock unfairness is extremely noticable,
with a userspace test having a difference of up to 2x runtime per thread, and
some threads are starved or "unfairly" granted the lock up to 1 000 000 (!)
times. After this patch, all threads appear to finish at exactly the same
time.
The memory ordering of the lock does conform to x86 standards, and the
implementation has been reviewed by Intel and AMD engineers.
The algorithm also tells us how many CPUs are contending the lock, so
lockbreak becomes trivial and we no longer have to waste 4 bytes per
spinlock for it.
After this, we can no longer spin on any locks with preempt enabled
and cannot reenable interrupts when spinning on an irq safe lock, because
at that point we have already taken a ticket and the would deadlock if
the same CPU tries to take the lock again. These are questionable anyway:
if the lock happens to be called under a preempt or interrupt disabled section,
then it will just have the same latency problems. The real fix is to keep
critical sections short, and ensure locks are reasonably fair (which this
patch does).
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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Move the headers to include/asm-x86 and fixup the
header install make rules
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
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