Re: [PATCH] Remove l_flushsema

David Chinner
2008-04-30T12:14:12Z

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 05:52:53AM -0600, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 09:11:54PM +1000, David Chinner wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 06:58:32AM -0400, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > > On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 08:41:25PM +1000, David Chinner wrote:
> > > > The only thing that I'm concerned about here is that this will
> > > > substantially increase the time the l_icloglock is held. This is
> > > > a severely contended lock on large cpu count machines and putting
> > > > the wakeup inside this lock will increase the hold time.
> > > >
> > > > I guess I can address this by adding a new lock for the waitqueue
> > > > in a separate patch set.
> > >
> > > waitqueues are loked internally and don't need synchronization. With
> > > a little bit of re-arranging the code the wake_up could probably be
> > > moved out of the critical section.
> >
> > Yeah, I just realised that myself and was about to reply as such....
> >
> > I'll move the wakeup outside the lock.
>
> I can't tell whether this race matters ... probably not:
>
> N processes come in and queue up waiting for the flush
> xlog_state_do_callback() is called
> it unlocks the spinlock
> a new task comes in and takes the spinlock
> wakeups happen
>
> ie do we care about 'fairness' here, or is it OK for a new task to jump
> the queue?

This has always been a possibility here. However, this deep inside the log code
I don't think it really matters because the waiters have log space
reservations. In overload conditions, fairness is handled when obtaining
a reservation via a ordered ticket queue (see xlog_grant_log_space()).
Thundering herds tend to be thinned to smaller bursts by this queue, too...

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group