Re: [PATCH -v8][RFC] mutex: implement adaptive spinning

Peter Zijlstra
2009-01-12T17:13:08Z

On Mon, 2009-01-12 at 18:13 +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:

> One thing that worries me here is that the spinners will spin on a
> memory location in struct mutex, which means that the cacheline holding
> the mutex (which is likely to be under write activity from the owner)
> will be continuously shared by the spinners, slowing the owner down when
> it needs to unshare it. One way out of this is to spin on a location in
> struct mutex_waiter, and have the mutex owner touch it when it schedules
> out.

Yeah, that is what pure MCS locks do -- however I don't think its a
feasible strategy for this spin/sleep hybrid.

> So:
> - each task_struct has an array of currently owned mutexes, appended to
> by mutex_lock()

That's not going to fly I think. Lockdep does this but its very
expensive and has some issues. We're currently at 48 max owners, and
still some code paths manage to exceed that.

> - mutex waiters spin on mutex_waiter.wait, which they initialize to zero
> - when switching out of a task, walk the mutex list, and for each mutex,
> bump each waiter's wait variable, and clear the owner array

Which is O(n).

> - when unlocking a mutex, bump the nearest waiter's wait variable, and
> remove from the owner array
>
> Something similar might be done to spinlocks to reduce cacheline
> contention from spinners and the owner.

Spinlocks can use 'pure' MCS locks.