Re: [RFC PATCH v8 1/9] Restartable sequences system call

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 05:56:25PM +0000, Ben Maurer wrote:
> rseq opens up a whole world of algorithms to userspace – algorithms
> that are O(num CPUs) and where one can have an extremely fast fastpath
> at the cost of a slower slow path. Many of these algorithms are in use
> in the kernel today – per-cpu allocators, RCU, light-weight reader
> writer locks, etc. Even in cases where these APIs can be implemented
> today, a rseq implementation is often superior in terms of
> predictability and usability (eg per-thread counters consume more
> memory and are more expensive to read than per-cpu counters).
>
> Isn’t the large number of uses of rseq-like algorithms in the kernel a
> pretty substantial sign that there would be demand for similar
> algorithms by user-space systems programmers?

Yes and no.  It provides a substantial sign that such algorithms could
and should exist; however "someone should do this" doesn't demonstrate
that someone *will*.  I do think we need a concrete example of a
userspace user with benchmark numbers that demonstrate the value of this
approach.

Mathieu, do you have a version of URCU that can use rseq to work per-CPU
rather than per-thread?  URCU's data structures would work as a
benchmark.

Ben, Mathieu, Dave, do you have jemalloc benchmark numbers with and
without rseq?  (As well as memory usage numbers for the reduced memory
usage of per-CPU pools rather than per-thread pools?)