Re: [RFC PATCH] introduce sys_membarrier(): process-wide memory barrier

Steven Rostedt
2010-01-09T23:05:34Z

On Sat, 2010-01-09 at 14:20 -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:

> > > Using the spinlocks adds about 3s for 10,000,000 sys_membarrier() calls
> > > or a 8-core system, for an added 300 ns/core per call.
> > >
> > > So the overhead of taking the task lock is about twice higher, per core,
> > > than the overhead of the IPIs. This is understandable if the
> > > architecture does an IPI broadcast: the scalability problem then boils
> > > down to exchange cache-lines to inform the ipi sender that the other
> > > cpus have completed. An atomic operation exchanging a cache-line would
> > > be expected to be within the irqoff+spinlock+spinunlock+irqon overhead.
> >
> > Let me rephrase the question... Isn't the vast bulk of the overhead
> > something other than the runqueue spinlocks?
>
> I don't think so. What we have here is:
>
> O(1)
> - a system call
> - cpumask allocation
> - IPI broadcast

> O(nr cpus)

Isn't this really O(tasks) ?

Don't you do the spinlock(task_rq(task)->rq->lock)?

So the scale is not with large boxes, but the number of tasks that must
be checked. Still, if you have 1000 threads, a rcu writer is bound to
take a bit of overhead. But the advantage is the readers are still fast.

RCU is known to be slow for writing. A user must be aware of this.

Then we should have O(tasks) for spinlocks taken, and
O(min(tasks, CPUS)) for IPIs.

cpumask = 0;
foreach task {
spin_lock(task_rq(task)->rq->lock);
if (task_rq(task)->curr == task)
cpu_set(task_cpu(task), cpumask);
spin_unlock(task_rq(task)->rq->lock);
}
send_ipi(cpumask);

-- Steve

> - wait for IPI handlers to complete
> - runqueue spinlocks