Re: [RFC PATCH 3/3] x86,smp: auto tune spinlock backoff delay factor

[Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 10:58:48PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On 12/21/2012 10:49 PM, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> >On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 09:51:35PM -0500, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> >>However, since spinlock contention should not be the
> >>usual state, and all a scalable lock does is make sure
> >>that N+1 CPUs does not perform worse than N CPUs, using
> >>scalable locks is a stop-gap measure.
> >>
> >>I believe a stop-gap measure should be kept as simple as
> >>we can. I am willing to consider moving to a per-lock
> >>delay factor if we can figure out an easy way to do it,
> >>but I would like to avoid too much extra complexity...
> >
> >Rik,
> >
> >I like your solution. It's rather simple and simple solutions tend to
> >end up being the closest to optimal. The more complex a solution gets,
> >the more it starts chasing fireflies.
> 
> >Anyway, I'd like to see this code tested, and more benchmarks run
> >against it.
> 
> Absolutely.  I would love to see if this code actually
> causes regressions anywhere.
> 
> It is simple enough that I suspect it will not, but there
> really is only one way to find out.
> 
> The more people test this with different workloads on
> different SMP systems, the better.
>

Great work Rik,

I have a couple of small SMP systems I'll start to test with your patches, also
I might be able to test this work after new year's eve on a big SMP box that 
seems to be facing a severe lock starvation issue due to the BUS saturation 
your work is aiming to reduce.

Cheers!
-- Rafael