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

Paul E. McKenney
2010-01-09T01:21:31Z

On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 08:02:31PM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> * Paul E. McKenney (paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com) wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 08, 2010 at 06:53:38PM -0500, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> > > * Steven Rostedt (rostedt@goodmis.org) wrote:
> > > > Well, if we just grab the task_rq(task)->lock here, then we should be
> > > > OK? We would guarantee that curr is either the task we want or not.
> > >
> > > Hrm, I just tested it, and there seems to be a significant performance
> > > penality involved with taking these locks for each CPU, even with just 8
> > > cores. So if we can do without the locks, that would be preferred.
> >
> > How significant? Factor of two? Two orders of magnitude?
> >
>
> On a 8-core Intel Xeon (T is the number of threads receiving the IPIs):
>
> Without runqueue locks:
>
> T=1: 0m13.911s
> T=2: 0m20.730s
> T=3: 0m21.474s
> T=4: 0m27.952s
> T=5: 0m26.286s
> T=6: 0m27.855s
> T=7: 0m29.695s
>
> With runqueue locks:
>
> T=1: 0m15.802s
> T=2: 0m22.484s
> T=3: 0m24.751s
> T=4: 0m29.134s
> T=5: 0m30.094s
> T=6: 0m33.090s
> T=7: 0m33.897s
>
> So on 8 cores, taking spinlocks for each of the 8 runqueues adds about
> 15% overhead when doing an IPI to 1 thread. Therefore, that won't be
> pretty on 128+-core machines.

But isn't the bulk of the overhead the IPIs rather than the runqueue
locks?

W/out RQ W/RQ % degradation
T=1: 13.91 15.8 1.14
T=2: 20.73 22.48 1.08
T=3: 21.47 24.75 1.15
T=4: 27.95 29.13 1.04
T=5: 26.29 30.09 1.14
T=6: 27.86 33.09 1.19
T=7: 29.7 33.9 1.14

So if we had lots of CPUs, we might want to fan the IPIs out through
intermediate CPUs in a tree fashion, but the runqueue locks are not
causing excessive pain.

How does this compare to use of POSIX signals? Never mind, POSIX
signals are arbitrarily bad if you have way more threads than are
actually running at the time...

Thanx, Paul