Re: [PATCH RFC 1/2] qrwlock: A queue read/write lock implementation

[Waiman Long <waiman.long@hp.com>]

On 07/18/2013 06:22 AM, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> Waiman,
>
> On Mon, 15 Jul 2013, Waiman Long wrote:
>> On 07/15/2013 06:31 PM, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>>> On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Waiman Long wrote:
>>>> Apparently, the regular read/write lock performs even better than
>>>> the queue read/write lock in some cases.  This is probably due to the
>>> The regular rwlock performs better in most cases. This is the full
>>> list comparing both against the ticket lock.
>>>
>>>       qrlock  	   rwlock
>>>       +20.7  	   +44.4
>>>       +30.1  	   +42.9
>>>
>>>       +56.3  	   +63.3
>>>       +52.9  	   +48.8
>>>
>>>       +54.4  	   +65.1
>>>       +49.2  	   +26.5
>>>
>>> So you try to sell that qrwlock as a replacement for ticket spinlocks,
>>> while at the same time you omit the fact that we have an even better
>>> implementation (except for the last test case) already in the
>>> kernel. What's the point of this exercise?
>> The main point is that the regular rwlock is not fair while the
>> queue rwlock is close to as fair as the ticket spinlock. The LWN
>> article http://lwn.net/Articles/364583/ mentioned about eliminating
>> rwlock altogether precisely because of this unfairness as it can
>> cause livelock in certain scenerio. I also saw slides to advise
>> again using rwlock because of this.
> I'm well aware of this. But that does not explain anything of what I
> asked.
>
>>>> + * has the following advantages:
>>>> + * 1. It is more deterministic. Even though there is a slight chance
>>>> of
>>> Why is it more deterministic than the existing implementation?
>> Deterministic means that that a process can acquire a lock within a
>> reasonable time period without being starved for a long time. The qrwlock
>> grants lock in FIFO order in most cases. That is what I mean by being more
>> deterministic.
> That's exactly the kind of explanation we want to have in the code and
> the changelog.

Sometimes I may take things for granted without explaining them in more 
details. Thank for reminding me and I will try to get more data in to 
support my arguments.

>>>> + *    stealing the lock if come at the right moment, the granting of
>>>> the
>>>> + *    lock is mostly in FIFO order.
>>>> + * 2. It is faster in high contention situation.
>>> Again, why is it faster?
>> The current rwlock implementation suffers from a thundering herd problem.
>> When many readers are waiting for the lock hold by a writer, they will all
>> jump in more or less at the same time when the writer releases the lock.
>> That is not the case with qrwlock. It has been shown in many cases that
>> avoiding this thundering herd problem can lead to better performance.
> That makes sense and wants to be documented as well. You could have
> avoided a lot of the discussion if you had included these details
> right away.
>
>>>> + * an increase in lock size is not an issue.
>>> So is it faster in the general case or only for the high contention or
>>> single thread operation cases?
>>>
>>> And you still miss to explain WHY it is faster. Can you please explain
>>> proper WHY it is faster and WHY we can't apply that technique you
>>> implemented for qrwlocks to writer only locks (aka spinlocks) with a
>>> smaller lock size?
>> I will try to collect more data to justify the usefulness of qrwlock.
> And please provide a proper argument why we can't use the same
> technique for spinlocks.

Of course, we can use the same technique for spinlock. Since we only 
need 1 bit for lock, we could combine the lock bit with the queue 
address with a little bit more overhead in term of coding and speed.  
That will make the new lock 4 bytes in size for 32-bit code & 8 bytes 
for 64-bit code. That could solve a lot of performance problem that we 
have with spinlock. However, I am aware that increasing the size of 
spinlock (for 64-bit systems) may break a lot of inherent alignment in 
many of the data structures. That is why I am not proposing such a 
change right now. But if there is enough interest, we could certainly go 
ahead and see how things go.

>>> Aside of that, you are replacing all RW locks unconditionally by this
>>> new fangled thing, but did you actually run tests which look at other
>>> rwlock usage sites than the particular one you care about?
>> Users have the choice of using the old rwlock or the queue rwlock by
>> selecting or unselecting the QUEUE_RWLOCK config parameter. I am not
>> forcing the unconditional replacement of rwlock by qrwlock.
> Looking at patch 2/2:
>
> +config ARCH_QUEUE_RWLOCK
> +       def_bool y
>
> What's conditional about that? Where is the choice?

The queue read/write lock replaces the classic read/write lock in the 
arch-dependent layer. We will need to make changes to each architecture 
to make queue read/write lock work. The presence of ARCH_QUEUE_RWLOCK 
just indicates that changes are made in that architecture to support the 
use of queue read/write lock. It doesn't mean that it is enabled by 
default. Users still need to choose it (QUEUE_RWLOCK) from the 
configuration menu. The ARCH_QUEUE_RWLOCK does prevent the menu option 
from even showing up for those architectures that have not been changed 
to support this feature. As I don't have test machines for the other 
architectures to verify the changes, my patch set only enables queue 
read/write lock for x86 only.

>>> You are optimizing for the high frequency writer case. And that's not
>>> the primary use case for rwlocks. That's the special use case for the
>>> jbd2 journal_state_lock which CANNOT be generalized for all other
>>> rwlock usage sites.
>> It is true that this lock is kind of optimized for writers. For
>> reader heavy code, the performance may not be as good as the rwlock
>> for uncontended cases. However, I do believe that the fairness
>> attribute of the qrwlock far outweigh the slight performance
>> overhead of read lock/unlock.  Furthermore, the lock/unlock sequence
>> contributes only a very tiny percentage of total CPU time in
>> uncontended cases. A slight increase may not really have a material
>> impact on performance. Again, as promised, I will try to collect
>> some more performance data for reader heavy usage cases.
> Yes, please. We really need this information and if it turns out, that
> it does not affect reader heavy sides, I have no objections against
> the technology itself.

I am collecting more performance data right now for the next revision of 
the patch. I had optimized the fast path of the lock to make write lock 
2/3 the time of a spinlock and the read lock is now 1.5X of the spinlock 
time instead of 2X.

Regards,
Longman